SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

The Raymond Gubbay Tosca: Soloists, chorus, actors and children, David Freedman (director), David Roger (designer), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Peter Robinson (musical director). Royal Albert Hall, London 28.2.2008 (JPr)

Cynthia Lawrence as Tosca

The announcement that the television broadcasts from the New York Metropolitan Opera have been going on for a couple of years came as something of a surprise to me. And after the promise of more cinema presentations this Spring of seven operas from La Scala and two other Italian opera houses - comes the press release from Covent Garden that performances from Royal Opera and Royal Ballet will be similarly screened in cinemas worldwide, although not here at home. This feels like a seriously missed opportunity for one of our great institutions to spread the word that opera and ballet really can be accessible for everyone, rather than maintaining the myth of elitism so prevalent in the UK.

Hats off then to Raymond Gubbay, one of the pioneers in bringing classical music and opera to the masses here! Raymond Gubbay began small and I recall many wonderful Johann Strauss concerts with the equally splendid Willi Boskovsky opera galas, Christmas festivals, and Gubbay's eventual branching out into arena opera and then opera ‘in the round’. Early attempts were a bit rough and ready and there were problems with the music and sound reproduction. But since 1998 the Australian, David Freeman, has directed Madam Butterfly, Carmen, Tosca and Aida for Raymond Gubbay bringing these operas to large crowds and earning more appreciative noises from critics.

That Gubbay attracts a different crowd than would be seen at the Covent Garden or ENO is more than apparent when it becomes clear that it is the heroine’s fall of some twenty feet to her ‘death’ at the end of the evening which generates the greatest ovation and we hear Scarpia being booed – not for poor singing – but because of his ‘pantomime villain’ nature. Full credit however goes to the Tosca, in this latest Gubbay production, the American Cynthia Lawrence who has a gymnastic background apparently,  takes this impressive fall herself: the other Tosca in a double cast, Paula Delligatti will make a brief disappearance at the top of a flight of steps to swap with a stunt double.

I am newly back to this ‘opera in the round’ and have neither seen Carmen nor Madam Butterfly. While I can imagine Carmen using up the available spaces well, the latter, like Tosca, is another rather intimate affair in which vast ‘acres’ of the performing space may lie unused for large stretches of time. My feeling is that this 1999 Tosca production might have worked even better using only half the available area although David Roger’s Napoleonic designs worked well of course for the Sant’Andrea della Valle church: there were plenty of candles and incense burners hung down and metal railings lay around the perimeter outlining the chapel recesses. The space is also very apt for the end of the opera at the Castel Sant’Angelo. Here, there is a large replica of the Archangel Michael on the parapet from which Tosca leaps and the metal work is also cleverly brought centre-stage to construct a cage within which Cavaradossi is shot like a wounded zoo animal.

Cynthia Lawrence (Tosca) and Peter Sidhom (Scarpia)
 

The setting is much less successful for Act II and Scarpia’s room in the Palazzo Farnese. A massive red table is featured with Scarpia and Tosca seated at opposite ends and the ‘interrogation’ of Cavaradossi is all too visible: Tosca should be able to hear Cavaradossi's screams but should not turn round to watch him suffer. The distance the artists have to cover and the time they have to do it in creates other problems too. It's probably a minor niggle but when Scarpia sings ‘You can fetch the painter in’, Cavaradossi is halfway down some stalls steps and already in full view. But while the entry of the priests, children and crowds for the Te Deum in Act I had also used the same steps through the audience, that scene felt impressively staged because there was enough time available for all of it.

While I enjoyed the production enormously, its lack of intimacy does mean that some big moments were seriously fluffed. Scarpia’s entrance in Act I lost its impact because there were just so many other things to look at that it took time to find him in the crowd. The biggest problem by far though was that Tosca's Act I jealousy and Scarpia's Act II lust could only be displayed by the characters doing laps round the arena and when Scarpia got his hands on Tosca on top of the table, they looked as though they were auditioning for the Sumo Wrestling that Gubbay stages in the Royal Albert Hall next year.

The amplified singing did allow most of Amanda Holden’s English translation to be heard clearly, at least from my seat in the Stalls but, strangely, in the big moments of the two Cavaradossi arias and in Tosca’s 'Vissi d'Arte', regardless of some fine singing, the words became unrecognisable – perhaps actually because I know their sound so well from the original Italian? I did wonder why the opening Italian line so often became the second English one in the translation too. ‘E lucevan le stelle ...’ became ‘I remember an evening/when the stars shone so brightly’ and ‘O dolci mani! … ’ was ‘O let me kiss those/hands so soft and gentle’. Or maybe I'm just being picky?

Finally what about the singers? There was considerable experience from the two principals. Joseph Wolverton, another American, was certainly a bear-like Cavaradossi and while he didn't seem to do any painting, he had a secure, quite baritonal voice with a firm top: he overdid the sob and pain in his voice however, and might usefully have let the notes register their own emotions. Cynthia Lawrence was a convincing Tosca – equally as at home in riding clothes complete with horse whip in Act I as in the black dress with gold trimmings and shawl for Act II. Her soprano voice was ardent and angry when necessary but could also be delicately softened; at least as delicately as the vast spaces would allow. What she and Peter Sidhom’s Scarpia lacked was a real dramatic presence with what I might describe as the ‘I’m It!’ look about them. She was insufficiently the ‘Diva’ and he lacked the quiet menace his position of power should give him. Peter Sidhom is an excellent Alberich and as Scarpia was still wonderful as Alberich! Scarpia is in fact a far different character to the Nibelung and Sidhom's voice lacked the hauteur and potency necessary, though he was much better in Act II than when struggling through Act I which left me thinking he must have been suffering an unannounced illness.

Standing out amongst the smaller parts was Richard Mosley-Evans’s Sacristan who had a voice good enough for Scarpia himself. Ben Whittington’s shepherd boy sang ‘Unhappy lover your pain will soon be over’ very sweetly but I didn’t really warm to the gaggle of street urchins rushing on, complete with football, at the start of Act III.  They looked like refugees from Oliver only there to illicit the ‘ahhhhhhhs’ from the audience.

As I say, I do not want to give the impression of not enjoying the performance which I most certainly did in its own terms. At the end I was a moved by Tosca’s plight and thoroughly entertained by Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker’ just as I should be. The sound was crystal clear and the amplification process did not intrude on my expectations of what I should be hearing. It was only very occasionally that the, often very well thought through, off-stage singing, bells and drums felt a bit unbalanced such as at the start of Act II where the ‘concert’, supposedly outside and heard through windows, was rather too loud. The experienced conductor, Peter Robinson, led a very clean account of the score which was well-played by members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.  He was probably supporting his singers in these special circumstances by never seeming very hurried.

Jim Pritchard


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page