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Confusing frolic

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

La Calisto
Royal Opera House

Tosca
Opera North, Leeds

The music is mainly second-rate, though Ivor Bolton and his team made a good case for it. There is a huge amount of barely heightened speech, recitativo which is molto secco. The most expressive music is for Endimione, sung with winning pathos by the burly counter-tenor Lawrence Zazzo, the most agreeable member of that species I have heard in a long time. The other star — by the end, in both senses — is Sally Matthews, the altogether endearing Calisto. The cast is strong throughout, the only displeasure they give being when they put on funny voices to impersonate Nature, Eternity and Destiny. With its many moments of broad comedy, some of them unnecessarily so, its incessant fidgets and the large range of animal costumes, this is just the thing for people who don’t much like opera. So it is all the more ironic that there were more empty stalls on the first night than I can ever remember seeing. Why has the Royal Opera’s PR team, which has recently been so relentless in vulgar advertisements for the great works which it is the house’s privilege to stage, pulled back just when their gifts could be so suitably employed?

Opera North’s Tosca, directed by the other Alden, Christopher, makes a triumphant return in Leeds, and will be on tour. However well you know the opera, see this. It is a shocking adaptation, in the sense that it takes huge liberties with the action; but also in that it comes across with a power incommensurable with any other production of the work I have seen. The orchestra performed with stunning power under Andrea Licata, even if his speeds in Act I were leisurely: continuity was there, and huge impact. The Tosca of Takesha Meshé Kizart, great niece of a famous Blues singer, should surely be noticed as an amazing achievement, of intensity in acting and singing. Neither of the male leads is on her level, but the impact of the production, which exposes the hideous collaborative power of police state and Catholic Church, is almost undimmed from 2002. Robert Hayward’s Scarpia is external to the role, as he so often is, however much he goes through the motions — and what motions! This Scarpia strips to his boxers while Tosca sings ‘Vissi d’arte’, and is raping her when she stabs him, indeed only dies when he has finished with her. The atmosphere on stage is as sweaty as the temperature in the Grand Theatre’s auditorium. But I have rarely spent so intense an evening in the opera house, or been so impressed by this much-abused work of perverse genius.