Tosca review

Opera Holland Park opens its season with Puccini’s popular thriller, in a staging by Stephen Barlow that moves the action forward from the Napoleonic era to the period of La Dolce Vita – but it’s the dark underbelly of Roman life that is exposed in Yannis Thavoris’ sets, not the sophistication and faux glamour. This matches well with the tensions of Puccini’s melodrama, even if the regular settings – the interior of a grand Roman church, the richly ornate Palazzo Farnese, and the platform of the Castel Sant’Angelo – are nowhere to be seen.

Yet Barlow’s direction and the cast’s commitment turn the elements of a Roman street into an apt locale for the violent story to inhabit: Cavaradossi’s portrait of Mary Magdalene is a piece of pavement art; the Farnese a sleazy trattoria where Scarpia – a prominent politician with blatant criminal connections – has the painter tortured in Act II. And while it would be a spoiler to reveal the production’s final visual gesture, it is every bit as shocking as Tosca’s suicidal leap in the original.

Musically, things take a while to settle: the principals are not at their best in Act I, although Ross Ramgobin makes a memorable creation out of the Sacristan and Edwin Kaye fields an engaged Angelotti. Later on, Phillip Costovski squeezes every drop of juice out of his alternately craven and aggressive Spoletta, while Alex Jones is a deeply sinister Sciarrone. Opening the last act, treble Angelo Aninag presents the work’s single moment of innocence touchingly in his account of the Shepherd Boy’s song (here, in a distinctly unpastoral Rome, he’s just Boy).

Continues...