One of the great joys of performing arts is the opportunity to witness how flexible the classics can be. In opera, the same role can change over and over again, even over the lifetime of a single singer, as new interpreters come along. That's what keeps me coming back.
For example, this season at the Metropolitan Opera, a three-person cast appeared in a revival of Puccini's “Tosca.” The only thing they shared was a forced perspective set in David McVicar's brilliant, traditional work.
The first run in early fall was erratic and severely underpowered. The second time was in November, when the great soprano Lise Davidsen sang Tosca for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and tenor Freddie De Tommaso made his house debut, attracting attention. However, it was a bit disappointing, miscast and lacked the charm of Puccini's breathtaking drama.
Well, the third cast is fascinating. “Tosca” was revived Thursday in its best form of the season, with bass-baritone Bryn Terfel making a long-awaited triumphant return and soprano Sondra Radova, who played the incomparable Tosca at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in recent years. Novsky also returned. One of the best interpreters of this role today.
Terfel had been a Met favorite since the mid-1990s, but bad luck kept him away from the Met for 13 years. He was scheduled to play Scarpia in the 2017-18 production of McVicar, but withdrew to have a polyp removed from his vocal cords. And shortly before the pandemic halted live performances, he was scheduled to star in a new production of Wagner's “Dutchman's Flight,” but pulled out after breaking his ankle.
On Thursday, you could feel everyone breathe a sigh of relief when Terfel not only appeared in the first act, but announced it with a resounding resounding voice. Just as the score indicates, with “great authority”, that is, with great authority. His voice is so dexterous that he owned both Figaro and Wotan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and although he may have tired a little by the end of the second act, it is still strong and full of character.
If Quinn Kelsey's Scarpia, who sang the role in November, was motivated by admiration, Terfel's Scarpia relies on power. His villainy morphed throughout the night, growling among his entourage and becoming dark and sweet in front of Tosca. Occasionally, Tafel would exude madness, his eyes wide and white, or his body movements shifting into animalistic gestures.
This was a highly detailed and nuanced performance, a quality Tafel shares with Radvanovsky. At one point, during the second act showdown, he lifts her hand and kisses it, then opens his mouth as if to devour it. She drew back in disgust and he hissed and growled. Although neither was singing, the moment was pure opera.
Radvanovsky approached Tosca with fearlessness and the freedom of his playing. She made you laugh at first, then broke your heart, made you be afraid of her, but then at the end she flipped the script and demanded that you be afraid of her. Her hallmark was a penetrating whisper, the ability to fluctuate in volume in a single breath, bringing anguished cries to a sound that was thin and sympathetic but unbreakable at its core.
She brings out the best in tenor Brian Jagde, who plays her doomed lover Cavaradossi, the most traditional but also the surest singer to play the role this season. In the pit, Xian Zhang read a propulsive, even cinematic score. The details may have been skimped on, but there was a death-driven thrill.
Chan's baton matched the tense melodrama of the second act. But the difference between a regular performance of “Tosca'' and Thursday's success is whether the intensity of the score rises like electricity from the pit and through the singers.
At the end of the second act, when Radvanovsky looks down at Scarpia's corpse, she delivers the line “And before him all Rome trembled” with a mixture of triumph and tearful despair. I said in a voice that was mixed with. This scene alone is reason enough to go back to “Tosca.”
Tosca
At the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan until January 23. metopera.org.
