[Met Performance] CID:314040



Tosca
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, October 2, 1993 Matinee





Tosca (755)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/Giuseppe Giacosa
Tosca
Maria Guleghina

Cavaradossi
Plácido Domingo

Scarpia
Sherrill Milnes

Sacristan
François Loup

Spoletta
Charles Anthony

Angelotti
Herbert Perry

Sciarrone
Bradley Garvin

Shepherd
Franz Musial-Aderer

Jailer
LeRoy Lehr


Conductor
Julius Rudel


Production
Franco Zeffirelli

Costume Designer
Peter J. Hall

Stage Director
Max Charruyer





Tosca received sixteen performances this season.

Review 1:

Bernard Holland in The New York Times
Season Premiere of ‘Tosca” At the Met

"Tosca" returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon. Puccini's larger-and-simpler-than-life melodrama finds a comfortable home in this bigger-than-necessary opera house. And indeed, any successful "Tosca" is a matter of scale, a process by which day-to-day human responses are escalated to dimensions far beyond the ordinary. The extraordinary success of Saturday's performance lay largely in how well these proportions were calibrated, how compellingly true unrealistic human behavior set in unrealistic surroundings could be made to seem.


Singing as well as I have heard him sing, Placido Domingo found grandeur with impregnable dignity. His Cavaradossi occupied fully the space this production provides it. Maria Guleghina in the title role had the necessary physical glamour and emotional extravagance. The voice has reserves of power and a dark glow. Only the upper notes were tested; one heard a few signs of weariness by Act III.


There are subtler Scarpias than Sherrill Milnes's, but then there are subtler operatic parts. Puccini peoples "Tosca" with characters who never let ambiguity stand in the way of swift dramatic movement. One can make a case for more devious kinds of villainy, but Mr. MiInes's strutting gesturing evil is an honest response to an opera that elsewhere poses few problems in telling good guy from bad. Musically, his blunt, jarring attacks seemed happy to substitute violence for beauty, though in Scarpia's last moments of life, Mr. MiInes's legato singing sounded absolutely secure.


Julius Rudel, whose conducting of the Met's pit orchestra has sounded almost adversarial in the past, found excellent cooperation on Saturday. Max Charruyer is the stage director for the Franco Zeffirelli revival, and he established a pace that kept up crisply with one of the most devastatingly efficient opera scores ever written.


There was of course Mr. Zeffirelli to contend with. The soaring Baroque splendor of Act l's church scene is a fact of life, but Mr. Charruyer has also chosen to return to Act Ill's gratuitous scene change (a Zeffirelli trademark) whereby “E lucevan le stele” is sung from a prison cell that rises on the Met’s basement stage elevator.


It speaks well of Saturday’s cast that ears could compete so well with eyes. So antlike are Act I’s players, that even the most musically devoted will find their gaze drifting over the shoulders of Mr. Domingo and Miss Guleghina and on to expanses of gold leaf, luscious capitals and marble columns. It has been argued that Mr. Zeffirelli is more interested in things than in people, but perhaps he is simply a producer and designer who does not want to be left out when attention is being paid.


Saturday's measured exaggerations extended to secondary principals as well. Herbert Perry's Angelotti was handsomely sung and full of athletic anguish. François Loup made the Sacristan grumpy but not a buffoon. Charles Anthony's Spoletta was rug-chewing malice at its melodramatic extreme.


A final word on Mr. Domingo, whose 25 years at the Met and even longer career elsewhere have amounted to one punishing schedule after another. It is somewhat of a miracle that the voice not only remains unravaged but sounds at its highest bloom. The lean, pristine tone that Puccini asks of Cavaradossi lies more in the natural domain of Mr. Domingo's colleague Luciano Pavarotti. Mr. Domingo's tenor began on a baritonal foundation and through sheer industry and intelligence, an upper range was constructed on it. Here, artifice triumphs over physical limitation. Man conquers nature seldom, but Saturday's performances told us that it can be done.



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