Tosca

Published Friday 29 February 2008 at 12:45 by Edward Bhesania

Incense hangs in the air as you enter the Royal Albert Hall’s rotunda for David Freeman’s Tosca, new here in 1999, and the vast floor cloth gloriously depicts the Baroque ceiling of Rome’s Sant’Andrea della Valle, scene of the opera’s first act. A huge replica of the Saint Michael statue from the Castel Sant’Angelo presides over the third act, from the base of which Tosca plunges to her death in spectacular fashion.

The grand gestures are well covered in Freeman’s production - even if bent chief of police Scarpia’s apartment in Act II sports a rather over-sized dining table - and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Peter Robinson does justice to both the lyricism and pungency of Puccini’s score.

What, inevitably, falls short in this in-the-round staging is a sense of intimacy. It’s little enough help that there’s precious little chemistry between Joseph Wolverton’s Cavaradossi and Cynthia Lawrence’s Tosca in the first act, but it’s a shame that they’re rattling around in a huge open space. And in the first-act climax, as the stage is flooded with choirboys and parishioners in the climactic Te Deum, the triumphant machinations of Scarpia - who has set the path for Tosca’s destruction - are completely swamped by the liturgical spectacle.

The singing is good all round, though. Wolverton’s Cavaradossi is fearless in spirit, if slightly less so in tone, and Lawrence’s Tosca is solid, if unfeisty (she is a diva, after all). Peter Sidhom’s Scarpia is well observed, and Aled Hall’s physical stature lends a suitable air of toughness to the henchman Spoletta.

The amplified singing does mean you lose some tonal variety, and though presented in English, the text is not always crisply communicated. But with a good standard of singing and playing, and a generally effective production, this is a Tosca certainly worth catching.