Feel the passion
Michael Tanner
Tosca Royal Opera House Idomeneo Barbican Carmen Bernie Grant Arts Centre
The latest revival of Tosca at the Royal Opera, with many changes in production by Stephen Barlow, shows signs of taking the work seriously, though they are contradicted by the corporateand barfriendly intervals, of a length to dissipate tension and momentum. Antonio Pappano’s conducting, too, displays a passion for the opera, every orchestral masterstroke being held up as a trophy; while it also moves towards one ponderous pause after another, so that Act II, which when conducted coarsely enough is a terrifying vortex of violence and lust, seemed languorous and torpid. It all gave the excellent cast a chance to show their gifts, and they took it. The result was that the star of the occasion was Cavaradossi, usually a mere cipher without whom the perverse romance of Tosca and Scarpia couldn’t be worked out.
Jonas Kaufmann, a great tenor in his prime, is only used by Covent Garden in ‘stooge’ roles, but always electrifies by his presence and his thrilling Germano– Italian voice. His stupendous rendering of ‘Recondita armonia’ was rightly greeted with shouts of relief as much as excitement — this sound was what we last heard from Domingo in his prime; while ‘Vittoria!’ suggested a Corelli who hadn’t abandoned taste. And ‘E lucevan le stelle’ achieved such inwardness that it got the supreme accolade of silence. He is a convincing actor, too, though I wish he wouldn’t fold his arms as an all-purpose gesture of irritation, boredom, contempt or defiance. Paolo Gavanelli is a bug of a Scarpia, with not much more voice than Tito Gobbi had in his later years, but an effective portrayal of arthritic lechery and viciousness.
The Tosca of Micaela Carosi is on the grand scale, imperious vocally and in demeanour, though she doesn’t have a great deal of voice at her disposal. The secondary roles are exceptionally strongly cast — but now we need Opera North’s astonishing production to show what Tosca can really be, if the idea is that we should be distressed as well as shocked. All Paul Brown’s heavy masonry, besides being perilous for the singers and largely ghastly to look at, suggests that the audience should be mere sight-seers, while a production that involves you is an experience that gives pause for some disturbing thoughts.
Strangely enough, at the Barbican a couple of evenings later, Idomeneo could only be described as thrilling, the one word that David Cairns, in his celebration of the work’s greatness in the programme (free, as always at the Barbican), doesn’t seem tempted to use. Understandably, too, for this noble opera, the greatest work of Mozart’s early maturity, does tend towards the statuesque. In this urgent and slimmeddown account, with Europa Galante under Fabio Biondi, it had me on the edge of my comfortable seat. The cast stayed onstage throughout, the only demonstrative presence was that of Biondi himself, crouching before his orchestra, wandering off the podium to incite greater passion from the singers, with the help of his violin bow, which was also his baton. It worked: even Arbace, sung by the outstanding young tenor Benjamin Hulett, became a proactive confidant, something unheard of.
The title role was taken by Ian Bostridge, a tenor at the opposite end of the spectrum from Kaufmann — though I’d love to hear Kaufmann sing the part (but I think Bostridge perhaps should resist any temptation to move into Puccini). It was an ardent, agonised performance, giving at the knees, and not leaving me with much impression of what a happy Idomeneo might sound like. Kate Royal as Ilia, the beloved of Idomeneo’s son, was passionate and produced a stream of beautiful sounds, but what she seems to regard as the luxury of enunciation would, if she pursued it, take her to the heart of roles of which she at present is merely a curator. Idamante, taken by Jurgita Adamonyte, demonstrated how beauty leads, in this kind of music, to truth; and Emma Bell was a riveting Elettra, unashamed to seem demented herself, but showing the sensuousness of the character movingly as well. This was a great evening, banishing all those worthy and tedious ones spent at earnest expositions of this tricky masterpiece.
A small company called Sixty Minute Opera, which previously performed annually in Tower Hamlets, is now in the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Haringey, which opened last year and is an ideal setting for this kind of enterprise: to show schoolchildren, in this case ten-year-olds from Chestnuts School, how much they can get out of opera if they put something into it. The four young professional singers, all talented and convincing, accompanied on the piano by Howard Moody, a genius of communication, enacted Carmen with irresistible engagement, so that the audience was thrilled to run on to the stage at the end and take sides — the Toreador’s outfit being an unfair attraction. This was an exhilarating, direct, extremely intelligent way of showing how the kind of ‘target’ which endless Labour blather goes on about can be met by dedicated and gifted people with energy and imagination, qualities we hear less about than we need to.
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