Puccini in a puppet show: the Royal Opera House’s 2021-2022 revival of Tosca
The familiar, fifteen-year-old production shrinks to postcard-size in a display window of caricatures.
Anna Pirozzi’s Tosca lays candles at her murdered victim’s side. Photo credit: Tristram Kenton/ROH
Stumbling like the hooves of horses in a cavalry that skids down rocky slopes, some orchestras take several steps to land the notes across their staves. Stayed sections stand in line like animals approaching Noah’s Ark as synchronicity snaps into staggers. Music morphs into a form more incomplete than half-made bars or black dots missing stems.
Like a hobbling hunchback, this year the Royal Opera House’s simulacrum of Puccini’s Tosca bends at halts with every half a dozen paces. At Oksana Lyniv’s helm the orchestra becomes a hawk hard-pressed to crack the hail piled in its nest as swiftly-tumbling notes on flute spill like a pool of shattered glass and squawks emerge from ill-meshed horns and trumpets. Each finish is abrupt: cleared-off like objects blocking passage to a burglar. Delays are indefiable as the ensemble struggles to catch up with Tosca’s hasty actions; sour strings plié-ing like a fumbling ballerina during “Vissi d’arte” and all sections struggling to accompany the heroine as she stands staring at her murdered victim, Scarpia. “Or gli perdono,” (“Now I pardon him,”) admits the stunned protagonist – still waiting for her instrumental escorts.
Hiccoughs seem to stylise the rest of Jonathan Kent’s fifteen-year-old tired, by now intrepid incarnation of the popular Puccini opera. Revival director Amy Lane adds little to his rudimentary visuals: a gold fence sparks almost all the lustre of Rome’s Sant’Andrea della Valle Church; Cavaradossi’s aria, “E lucevan le stelle” (“And the stars were shining”) takes place with the backdrop of a giant starry sky.
Simplicity succeeds in opera on the heels of lofty greats whose luminous performances loom over uncreative elegance. Here their demeanour is misguidedly much denser than the décor.
Summoning a strength gargantuan, Riccardo Massi strives to mount a superhuman with each entrance as Cavaradossi. Final notes of lines are drawn out to the point of buckling from exhaustion in a manner scarcely feasible: “nia” in “Recondita armonia” (“Hidden harmony”) is tripled in its length and perilously pitched; the tenor’s proclamation of “Vittoria” in Act II stretches “tor” into some seven syllables. Clumsiness is the consistent feature in a skeletal embodiment apparently more focused on the execution of loud notes than realism.
Joining Massi with her flair for the far-fetched is Anna Pirozzi, the soprano portraying the titular role. Overexpression excises the tender moments in a histrionic tour de force whose excess sours notes in simple phrases like, “Lascia pria che la preghi, che l’infiori,” (“Let me first pray and offer these flowers”). Dragging the skirt of her dress to and fro, Pirozzi offers cartoon eyes in simulations of her horror. When she however lets slip the location of much-hounded political prisoner, Angelotti – “Nel pozzo, nel giardino” (“In the well, in the garden”) – she does so like a local telling a lost tourist how to reach the station. Her tone is troubled throughout “Vissi d’arte” and she starts “Sempre, con fe sincera” (“Always with true faith”) a few bars early before realising her error and resuming punctually.
Imperiousness at least imbues the Scarpia of Claudio Sgura as he deftly varnishes his villain’s threats with venomous vibrato. Self-love exudes with every one of his commands; serving his bombasticity as he instructs Sciarrone, “Le darai questo biglietto” (“Give Tosca this note”). Certain words are nevertheless oversaturated with this smugness – on the brink of stereotype as Scarpia remarks, “È vin di Spagna,” (“It’s a Spanish wine”) with a congratulating stress. Others collapse into misfired intonations. Asking Tosca which way out of Rome she and her lover plan to take (all the while knowing he will kill the latter), he extends the name with high-pitched shyness in a strangely scared “Civitavecchia”.
Devolving into serial strained notes and squeaks not unlike exclamations in a puppet show, the piece assumes the latter’s guise as errant players pop its naturalism; coating it in a display less intricately crafted than a Harrods Christmas shopping window.
But the latter would most likely be more fun to watch.