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by Giacomo Puccini, directed by Paul Curran

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

January 26-February 23, 2008

If we were to the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Puccini’s Tosca solely on the basis of its first act, the impression would highly favourable.  Designer Kevin Knight’s set recreating the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome is majestic and his Empire-style costumes are gorgeous.  Director Paul Curran establishes the action with verve as we are caught up in struggle of the painter Cavaradossi (Mikhail Agafonov) and his comrades against the Roman police state of 1800.  The villainous Baron Scarpia (Alan Opie) makes a theatrical entrance and we see Cavaradossi’s lover, the singer Tosca (Eszter Sümegi), as beautiful but flighty and given to baseless jealousy. 

After such a fine set-up the remaining two acts disappoint.  Knight’s set for Scarpia’s headquarters in the Palazzo Farnese again is magnificent, but he gives Tosca an awkward gown that impedes her every movement.  Since Curran has her repeatedly cross and recross the stage, Sümegi has to hitch up the gown and kick her train out of the way every time.  Not only is this distracting but it impedes the spontaneity necessary to create tension.  In the best productions we can trace Tosca’s transformation from the trivial person she was to someone who finally awakens to politic action.  In Curran’s staging Tosca seems motivated by no higher ideal than self-preservation.  By Act III, the set itself is awkward.  How many prisons have jail cells that soldiers have to march through on their rounds or flimsy wire mesh instead of bars?   At the end Tosca is supposed to throw herself from the top of the Castel Sant’Angelo into the Tiber, but here, with no outdoor view, she seems to cast herself into the prison’s cistern.   

Luckily, the singing is strong.  Agafonov has an enormous tenor voice quite suited to this role, but his acting is wooden.  Sümegi’s voice is dark and clear in its lower range but begins to sound squally in her upper range.  She played Tosca here in 2003 and under Denni Sayers’ direction gave the character greater depth.  Opie is an expert Scarpia, obsessed from the first with possessing Tosca.  Robert Pomakov is delightful as the prim and fussy Sacristan.  The real star of the show, however, is the COC orchestra who under conductor Richard Buckley, create wave upon wave of opulent sound filled with more drama and bite than anything occurring onstage.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-01-28.

Photo: Eszter Sümegi as Tosca. ©Michael Cooper.