Again, this is all Puccini’s work, but you still have to frame it right. ![]() The high point is Act 2, a single-arc, one -breath 45 minutes of drama, Loy and conductor Leo Hussain (another peripatetic Englishman we haven’t seen enough of) harnessing the pacing to sickeningly gripping effect as Mario is led to the torture chamber and Scarpia outlines to Tosca the terms of his contract: her body for her lover’s life. This is helped by Christian Schmidt’s judicious stage designs - monochrome with flashes of red (I also liked the time-coded costumes: New Look for Tosca, ancien regime for the baddies). Loy controls the stage brilliantly, a baleful deliberateness of chorus entrances and movement that winds up the dread and tension. Probably Roland Wood’s erotomaniac Scarpia doesn’t need to roll round on the floor quite so much in furious lust, but he too busts out of the cartoon role into powerful life, vocally and physically tightly coiled - very obviously a danger to life. She moreover somehow succeeds in making the histrionic, wildly jealous, sexually abandoned yet childishly religious young diva into more promising girlfriend material than her CV might suggest. The English tenor Adam Smith and Irish soprano Sinéad Campbell- Wallace have the power and lyricism for it. There is an unaffected simplicity about the scenes of the painter Mario Cavaradossi and singer Floria Tosca’s horseplay in the church, two little love-bunnies quite unprepared for the steamroller that’s about to hit them. Tosca is a machine of terrific efficiency that (perhaps not so simply) just needs all its parts arranged and orchestrated for maximum effect, and ENO has assembled the right cast and conductor for that. The first time, with great effect, it rises suddenly from the side-chapel of the church of Sant’ Andrea, where it has been demurely hanging, to disclose Puccini’s Prince of Darkness Scarpia who storms into the church in a fabulously camp entrance (much aided by Puccini’s crashing tritone chords) with deathly bleak light and an pack of ratlike 18th century lackeys in black wigs … Well, welcome to the opera, indeed, where some mad musical alchemy turns a scene that could be pretty laughable into one of existential terror that gives the heart a nasty lurch. I’ve seen plenty of Loy’s stagings (this is his first at ENO), but never one as literal as this, where his titivations of Puccini roughly amount to a fake theatrical curtain that grows in size and prominence - and commensurately loses its mojo - throughout the three acts. Mad musical alchemy turns a laughable scene into existential terror I n the end Puccini just forces you back to somewhere very like his chosen milieu of an eventful Rome day in 1800 when events at the battle of Marengo regrettably impinge on the lives of two rather wafty arts-world denizens. ![]() What’s the poor chap to do? The whole underground car-park setting option, beloved staging resort for most Italian opera over the last 20 years, is somewhat over. It’s not often that the critic’s icy heart is penetrated by anything like pity, but it’s hard not to feel a pang for the interventionist director Christoph Loy running up against a creature as obdurate as Puccini’s 1900 opera Tosca - so specific, so tightly composed, so punchy, so stubbornly itself.
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