United Kingdom The Grange Pageant 2024 – Puccini, Tosca: Soloists, The Grange Pageant Refrain (refrain grasp: William Vann), The Grange Pageant Youngsters’s Refrain (refrain grasp: David Corridor), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Francesco Cilluffo (conductor). The Grange, Hampshire 21.6.2024. (CK)

There may be an essay in The Grange Pageant programme e book for Christopher Luscombe’s tremendous new manufacturing of Tosca by its conductor, Francesco Cilluffo, entitled ‘Tosca, the opera Mahler by no means wrote’. It’s an attention-grabbing conjunction: nearly precise contemporaries, each composers have been males of the theatre – Puccini wrote nearly nothing besides operas, Mahler spent his complete (and intense) working life getting ready and conducting them. Each bestrode the fin de siècle divide between Romanticism and Modernism: for Cilluffo, ‘Tosca is the primary opera to cope with fashionable neurosis, bridging Italian opera…from late nineteenth-century verismo to twentieth-century expressionism’.

There, I believe, the resemblance ends: however Cilluffo is entitled to see a kinship between Mahler’s ironic/horrific imaginative and prescient in his later symphonies – of a world coming adrift from its conventional verities, of the tramp of armies in direction of the industrial-scale slaughter of mechanised warfare – and the claustrophobic terrors of Puccini’s Tosca-universe: a spot the place advantage, braveness and loyalty are on the mercy of violence and corruption, the place (regardless of the oppressive Catholic trappings) there is no such thing as a God to intervene, and the place love itself could be twisted to torment and betrayal.

Maybe these ideas are in themselves a sign of how powerfully the efficiency struck dwelling. In The Grange’s comparatively intimate area we skilled the moments of excessive drama viscerally, the taking part in of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra coming at us with stinging pressure.

The Uruguayan tenor Andres Presno took a short time to hit his stride as Cavaradossi: his tone not particularly stunning, his supply of Recondita armonia somewhat monochrome. Maybe it was deliberate that the looks of Tosca introduced him to life: his adoration of Tosca’s eyes was ardent certainly, and their two voices mixed thrillingly. Francesca Tiburzi’s Tosca was the actual deal: a well dressed VIP, her voice wealthy and full, imperious somewhat than sensuous. Dan D’Souza was true and touching as Angelotti; the Youngsters’s Refrain have been a full of life bunch of choirboys, leapfrogging and taking part in with yoyos underneath the indulgently blind eye of Darren Jeffrey’s imposing Sacristan. The shut of Act I used to be correctly spectacular, a sensory assault of color and sound (and incense), the blaze of the Te Deum enclosing the sinister brooding of Scarpia like a worm within the bud.

Act II generated even higher depth. It was clear from the looks of Scarpia and his thugs what sort of organisation Tosca is up in opposition to – one with too many chilling parallels (when Cavaradossi is executed on the finish of the opera there is no such thing as a firing squad, only a pistol to the top). Andrew Manea’s Scarpia is a pressure to be reckoned with; bodily not a lot an embodiment of twisted evil as a determine of virtually Hvorostovsky-like glamour, with greater than a touch of Don Giovanni about him as he lounged on his couch, having fun with Cavaradossi’s struggling and Tosca’s misery.

Tiburzi accomplished her personal portrait of Tosca with a movingly stunning Vissi d’arte, rapturously obtained. There was a robust chemistry between her and Manea, intensified by the elimination of Cavaradossi by means of a trapdoor to be tortured in a cellar. Bloody however unbowed, Presno was capable of greet the information of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo with a magnificently ringing and sustained Vittoria! In her cut price to save lots of her lover’s life Tosca submits to Scarpia eradicating her costume: when she has killed him, she retains the knife (smart lady), and makes use of it on the finish of the third act to do some extra harm earlier than falling elegantly backwards from the battlements.

I’m tempted to say that my favorite second of Act III was the stunning passage for horns that opens it: however that might be to do an injustice to Presno’s E lucevan le stelle, which was (accurately) the uncooked, existential disaster of the entire opera: the stark juxtaposition of misplaced Eros and imminent Thanatos. He sang it magnificently; a phrase, too, for the suitably fragile tune of the Shepherd boy (Sion Llywelyn-Davies).

The manufacturing values of the efficiency have been excessive, the mise-en-scène good-looking, naturalistic and detailed: the church inside for the primary act was mild, ethereal and exquisite, Scarpia’s lair within the Palazzo Farnese dark-panelled and windowless, the split-level roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo atmospheric and admirably suited to the drama of the daybreak. Fantastic music, magnificent theatre, and in Francesca Tiburzi, a Tosca for the ages. And but… it’s a very long time since Joseph Kerman dismissed the opera in a infamous alliterative phrase: however we could really feel barely uncomfortable, even complicit, in yielding to the Puccini model – sentiment spiced with sadism – at the same time as we acknowledge it to be a masterpiece. I can solely communicate for myself in saying that that’s half and parcel of Puccini, and testimony to the unflinching excellence of the efficiency. In any case, any such qualms quickly evaporate within the midsummer magic of the overall expertise of opera at The Grange.

A postscript. From my seat I used to be capable of respect one other method by which Puccini resembles Mahler: he writes splendidly effectively for tuba.

Chris Kettle

Manufacturing:
Director – Christopher Luscombe
Designer – Simon Higlett
Lighting designer – Mark Jonathan
Battle director – Maisie Carter

Forged:
Floria Tosca – Francesca Tiburzi
Mario Cavaradossi – Andres Presno
Baron Scarpia – Andrew Manea
Cesare Angelotti – Dan D’Souza
Sacristan – Darren Jeffery
Spoletta – Vladimir-Mihai Sima
Sciarrone – Stuart Orme
Gaoler – Meilir Jones
Shepherd boy – Sion Llywelyn-Davies
Decide – David Menezes
Roberti – Warren Gillespie
Cardinal – Richard Stead