“Tosca” can brand itself on your brain. After all, it’s the Grand Guignol of Italian opera.
Ask any of the hyper-engaged audiences oohing-and-aahing and clasping a seat-partner’s arm. Ok, this is probably the first time they’ve encountered Puccini’s perfect little potboiler, now on stage at the Music Center Pavilion stage, courtesy of LA Opera.
But all the makings are here for long-lasting effects. So much so that when super-thespians-with-voices enter the picture -- and I’m talking about the likes of Maria Ewing and Plácido Domingo -- there’s no chance that an indelible image will escape your memory (even from years ago).
Think of it: Tosca is The Diva. Her every entrance comes with a supple flourish, with regal bearing, her demeanor fed by lavish flattery and showers of love. Especially, but not enough of that high-powered stuff, from her amour Mario, the heroic artist/resistance fighter of fascist Rome who allows her jealous suspicions to fester.
Against both of them stands the spy-master despot Baron Scarpia -- radiating lust for Tosca and vengeance for Mario. Add in Puccini’s genius for music that dramatizes every blood-curdling and desperate and tender and triumphant moment.
Already you’ve got the score card.
But, if this time around the Ewing-Domingo memory didn’t materialize, if this time you didn’t see that time-capsule moment with Mario pressing Tosca to the wall in a sudden sizzling pang of passion, in their total loss of decorum within the church interior where she’s sought him out from his work, painting a Madonna likeness -- well, chalk it up.
And they weren’t the only famous ones to hold an audience in thrall. From the time Puccini penned what one critic called “a shabby little shocker” there have been stellar singing actors portraying Tosca -- most notably, Maria Callas. A few years ago we also had Sondra Radvanovsky, a regular Met star who is currently traipsing around Europe’s hot spots in the role.
Here and now, though, we are getting Angel Blue, she of the heavenly voice -- plush yet silvery, unstoppable up and down the range -- but stolid onstage, a block of a woman who has not yet discovered the art of acting. (Nor has assistant director Erik Friedman helped either her, or Michael Fabiano, as the twosome somewhat awkwardly groped each other as supposed lovers.)
So the John Caird/Bunny Christie production served up a clumsy, unconvincing, attempted take-down from the original -- that original, and most stagings generally, revealed a high Roman society dripping in elegant hauteur.
Instead, we saw this Floria Tosca arriving onstage dressed like a chamber maid, with her Mario wearing a lopsided, ill-fitting wig -- amid a 2nd act junk-er-ama warehouse of big, ugly sculptures and crates. And, on a note of poor casting, there was Ryan McKinny occupying the fulcrum role of Scarpia, not as the stylishly urbane villain who calls all the shots, so to speak, but one who resembles a puny valet.
Just as Tosca must epitomize all of diva-dom, Scarpia is supposed to be the core of insidious depravity, sniffing in his prey’s hatred as she shrinks into helplessness under his power. But how on earth, after finally managing to slit the throat of her enemy, can she believably say of this would-be tormentor, now lying dead on the floor: “And before him, trembled all of Rome.”
While everyone delivered vocally -- although Fabiano, now pushing his vibrant tenor to Met-sized volume, finally found that tender, soft singing and natural phrasing again once into the 3rd act duet -- this performance, with conductor Louis Lohrabeb coaxing the orchestra to loud emphatic cadences without much breadth or nuance, did not make it into the time capsule.
No matter. The audience got what it came for. Consider “Tosca” failproof.
And so were those faithful subscribers rewarded at Disney Hall for the LA Philharmonic’s outings with guest conductors — while its chief, Gustavo Dudamel, tended to his other posts and visited his homeland Venezuela.
Most welcome of the podium-warmers had to be Xian Zhang. And if you’re a player getting through a brand new piece of contemporary (spelled thorny) music, you’d gladly have this small, electrified maestra leading you through it.
Why? She’s a force. There’s not a bar in the score that she does not deeply know and animate -- with all the physical and expressive finesse of a high-value dancer. Limitations simply do not exist. She flies with the music, over the music, under the music, inside the music, cueing every solo, every section, wherever it bodily takes her. I’d say she owns the turf.
She and the orchestra also took possession of Qigang Chen’s “LEloignement,” her Chinese compatriot’s bewitching piece with its sweetly sad strings and agitated staccato -- before launching into Prokofiev’s 2nd Concerto with pianist Behzod Abduraimov, another one who gives a whole new meaning to the word ownership.
Of course the 20th century Russian composers don’t fool around. They demand musicians with chops -- of the extraordinary variety. And Abduraimov just might be leading the pack of his young generation. Own the work he did, producing big, percussive explosions and knuckle-crunching figurations.
But it was the nexus between him, Zhang and the band that caught Prokofiev’s emotional crossroads of grim anger, an outpouring of protest, a galvanized onslaught -- the perfect conjuring of a ferocious machine, all put to orchestral power.
On another Phil program -- this time with Gustavo Gimeno, an entirely stabilized, stiff-legged force on the podium -- there was Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony, a product of the same milieu as Prokofiev’s, its musical statement in reaction to Soviet political repression. No one needs a written note about this well-known score because it speaks for itself -- marching with treacherous footsteps, sighing with pathos in its appoggiaturas, exploding amid sarcasm and glory-mocking.
Huge credit for all this belongs to the band’s wind soloists as they each imbued the Largo’s melodic kernel with sadness before handing it off to the next instrument. In fact the entire orchestra, here and in Francisco Coll’s “Aqua Cinerea” -- a piece that treats the Phil like an acoustic candy store your kid just wandered into -- joined the party with their brilliantly clarified conflicts. Call it an event of joyous discord. Please, let’s hear it again.
But, also on the bill there was Saint-Saëns’ “Egyptian” Piano Concerto, championed to full advantage by Javier Perianes for all its sparkly runs and splashy octaves -- a piece that, to me, remains ever laughable, in its compulsively cartoonish regularity.