Perhaps they ought to call this show Scarpia, or even Cavaradossi, because at its heart there is a puzzling, pale shadow where the Tosca should be. So this is the celebrated Angela Gheorghiu? Rarely in Royal Opera history can a singer so much discussed, so hyped, have turned in a performance so insipid.
And in this of all roles — the quintessential operatic diva, proud, larger-than-life and florid. All we wanted Gheorghiu to do was play herself! Instead, whether on the instructions of the director, Jonathan Kent, or on a whim of her own devising, she tries to portray Tosca as some sort of delicate, dreamy, young girl in love, with coy little hand gestures continually distracting the eye, and singing to match — limp and uncharismatic for the most part, and sometimes inaudible.
Which makes a nonsense of Tosca’s histrionic deeds. Watching this heroine stab Bryn Terfel’s brutal, leering Scarpia is as believable as seeing a dove savage a rhino. True, Gheorghiu has never played the role on stage before, though she has done it on film. Sometimes this embarrassingly low-voltage display suggests that she is still playing to the camera and the microphone, rather than trying to sock it to the back of the upper circle. That’s not much good in a theatre.
Admittedly she isn’t helped by some frankly amateurish stage direction. She sings a fair number of her lines with her back to the audience, and (in Acts II and III) is hampered by a ball gown with a rustling train so long that her every movement must have required military planning.
Otherwise, Kent’s production — in Paul Brown’s gloomy, gargantuan, candle-strewn period sets — is remarkable only for a rather weird bird’s wing suspended over the stage in the outer acts (presumably symbolising someone’s soul taking flight, though it wasn’t mine). One wonders why Covent Garden bothered to replace Zeffirelli’s 40-year-old production with a staging that is scarcely less old-fashioned.
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Still, the evening has notable compensations. Terfel is superb, especially at the end of Act I where he skulks and broods with awesome malevolence on the lower stage while the Te Deum is hurled out from an upstage balcony. The Argentinian tenor Marcelo Alvarez may not have the noblest tone, but he gives a heroic 120 per cent as Cavaradossi, and is touchingly distressed in E lucevan le stelle.
And Antonio Pappano whips through the score with Italianate verve, plenty of sinuous orchestral textures and startlingly vivid dynamic contrasts. Should he rein in his rampant band to match his heroine’s peculiar reticence? I hope he doesn’t.
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