[Met Performance] CID:303880



Tosca
Metropolitan Opera House, Sat, March 30, 1991




Tosca (735)
Giacomo Puccini | Luigi Illica/Giuseppe Giacosa
Tosca
Maria Guleghina

Cavaradossi
Bruno Beccaria

Scarpia
James Morris

Sacristan
Italo Tajo

Spoletta
Anthony Laciura

Angelotti
Jeffrey Wells

Sciarrone
Russell Christopher

Shepherd
Ted Huffman

Jailer
Richard Vernon


Conductor
Pl?cido Domingo


Production
Franco Zeffirelli

Costume Designer
Peter J. Hall

Lighting Designer
Gil Wechsler

Stage Director
Fabrizio Melano





Tosca received seven performances this season.

Review 1:

Bernard Holland in The New York Times
The Return of ?Tosca? Big Sight, Big Sound

Franco Zeffirelli's six-year-old production of "Tosca" returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night, its smooth surface intact. The opulent gigantism of Mr. Zeffirelli's scenery still set audiences back in their seats. Saturday's singing boomed healthily. Little of subtlety transpired, but then is Puccini's opera ? with its cartoonlike characters and superb melodrama ? terribly subtle to begin with?


Beneath all this lay an evening of struggle ? between size and things on one side and quality and people on the other. First of all were the production and its determination to wrest the listener's attention from everything that might compete. At the end of Act I, as Scarpia ruminates on his pending villainy, Mr. Zeffirelli floods the stage with extras vivid in movement and color. Scarpia virtually ceases to exist. Given the vaulting Baroque splendor of Act I's church scene, there is little room for music anyway.


There is the last act's gratuitous scene change, where Cavaradossi's celebrated pre-execution sequence is ushered in by the Met stage elevator. It rises to create a subterranean cell framed by crumbled Roman architecture. Even the extravagant vulgarity of Bruno Beccaria's "E lucevan le stelle" could not compete with such feasts for the eye.


Actually, Mr. Beccaria and the evening's Tosca, Maria Guleghina, were qualified combatants in this artistic struggle of wills. Both combined for what must, have been the loudest "Tosca" heard here in quite a while. Armed with strength of lung and a dynamic range stretching from forte to fortissimo, they refused to be intimidated by the Met's 3,800 seats.


James Morris did everything a good Scarpia should do and certainly with more sophistication than those around him. Perhaps there is a fire in his stage aura that simply escapes me. The venerable Italo Tajo performed his familiar Sacristan, filling it to the brim with jokey detail. Jeffrey Wells was a strong Angelotti, Anthony Laciura an appropriately sinister Spoletta. Others in the cast were Russell Christopher, Ted Huffman and Richard Vernon.


?

Pl?cido Domingo conducted, often not very well. Yet he is such an intelligent musician, who knows what the years will bring? Mr. Domingo can be the victim of his own enthusiasms, going after big emphatic details that interrupt the flow of line. He also tends to conduct too much and has yet to grasp the conductorial secret of letting things happen rather than forcing them to. The complex mastery of coordinating stage and pit is not quite his: the crowd scene before Scarpia's first entrance just about fell apart.


Yet how well and loyally this splendid tenor has served the Met over the years. If Mr. Domingo wants to conduct, let him.



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