EGN NEWS DESK
A fantastic pleasure of the performing arts is the chance to witness how elastic the classics may be. In opera the identical position can rework, time and again, with every new interpreter, even over the lifetime of 1 singer. It’s a motive to maintain coming again.
At the Metropolitan Opera this season, for instance, there have been three casts for its revival of Puccini’s “Tosca.” The solely factor they’ve shared is the forced-perspective set of David McVicar’s ornately conventional manufacturing.
The first run, initially of the autumn, was uneven and largely underpowered. The second, in November, was buzzy, with the mighty soprano Lise Davidsen singing Tosca for the primary time on the Met, and the tenor Freddie De Tommaso making his home debut. But it was a little bit of a letdown, miscast and missing the cost of Puccini’s breathless drama.
Well, third solid’s a appeal. “Tosca” returned on Thursday in its finest type this season, with a triumphant, lengthy overdue return by the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, in addition to the return of the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a peerless Tosca on the Met in recent times, and one of many position’s most interesting interpreters right this moment.
Terfel has been a Met favourite for the reason that mid-Nineties, however dangerous luck has stored him away from the home for 13 years. He was meant to originate the position of Scarpia in McVicar’s staging when it was new, within the 2017-18 season, however withdrew to have a polyp faraway from his vocal cords. Then, not lengthy earlier than the pandemic shut down reside performances, he was set to star in a brand new manufacturing of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” however backed out after breaking an ankle.
You might sense a collective sigh of aid on Thursday when Terfel not solely made his entrance in Act I, however introduced it with booming resonance: really “con grande autorità,” or with nice authority, because the rating instructs. His voice, dexterous sufficient to have owned each Figaro and Wotan on the Met, could have been a contact weary by the top of Act II, however it’s nonetheless vigorous, and wealthy with character.
If the Scarpia of Quinn Kelsey, who sang the position in November, was motivated by longing, then Terfel’s runs on energy. His villainy modified form all through the night, snarling within the firm of cronies and darkly candy in entrance of Tosca. Occasionally, Terfel would let insanity seep out, flashing broad, white eyes or devolving into animalistic gestures.
This was a efficiency of maximum element and nuance, traits Terfel shares with Radvanovsky. At one level, within the showdown of Act II, he lifted her hand to kiss it, then opened his mouth as if to devour it. She pulled away in disgust, and he set free one thing like a hiss and growl. Neither was singing, however the second was pure opera.
Radvanovsky approached Tosca with fearlessness and the liberty of a very inhabited efficiency. She made you giggle at the beginning, then broke your coronary heart and made you worry for her, solely to flip the script and demand that you simply worry her. Her signature was the penetrating whisper, the power to fluctuate quantity inside a single breath, bringing an anguished cry to a sound each thinly sympathetic and unbreakable at its core.
She introduced out the very best within the tenor Brian Jagde, as her doomed lover Cavaradossi, who was in any other case essentially the most typical, but in addition most assured, singer in that position this season. In the pit, Xian Zhang led a propulsive, even cinematic studying of the rating that will have been mild on element however had a death-driven thrill to it.
Zhang’s baton matched the second act’s edge-of-your-seat melodrama. But the distinction between routine performances of Tosca and the success of Thursday’s is whether or not the rating’s depth rises from the pit by the singers like electrical energy.
When, on the finish of Act II, Radvanovsky regarded down upon Scarpia’s corpse, she set free the spoken line “And earlier than him all of Rome trembled” with a shattering mix of triumph and tear-streaked despair. This scene alone is motive to return, but once more, to “Tosca.”
Tosca
Through Jan. 23 on the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
