✭✭✭✭✩

by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Denni Sayers

Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto

September 26-October 11, 2003

The COC's fall season begins with two operas--Tosca and Peter Grimes-- concerning individuals at odds with the society around them.  In Puccini's Tosca (1900) the moral issues are black and white.  The painter Cavaradossi and his comrades struggle against the Roman police state run by the odious Baron Scarpia.  When Cavaradossi is captured and tortured, his beloved, the opera singer Tosca, is wrenched out of her apolitical world of art. 

        

Both operas are masterpieces but Tosca receives the more satisfying production.  The sets and costumes borrowed from the Teatro Comunale di Bologna are stupendous.   Each act is designed as a greyscale lithograph, dominated by a enormous symbolic figure--Mary Magdalene, St. Peter, Justice.  The period costumes are also in black and white except, initially, for Tosca.

Hungarian soprano Eszter Sümegi carefully charts the course of Tosca's transformation from frivolous self-involvement to political awakening, her voice clear, beautiful and strong.  French baritone Alain Fondary is a more aged Scarpia than usual but that merely makes him and his lust for Tosca all the more repellent.  Sly, subtle, sneering, Fondary plays Scarpia as the ultimate religious hypocrite. 

The Cavaradossi, Georgian tenor Badri Maisuradze, is a huge man with a huge voice.  Beyond sheer loudness his singing lacks nuance and his acting is rudimentary.  Conductor David Atherton gives a riveting account of the score.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-10-02.

Photo: Eszter Sümegi as Tosca. ©2003 Canadian Opera Company.