Tosca opera sf1/6/2023 The upward swirl of the Sant-Angelo fortress was topped by its sword-bearing Bernini-esque statue (brutal Renaissance art works were a visual focal point in each act). The palace’s Renaissance grandeur was marred by the detail of an art nouveau facade of a shadow box side-room (yes, the torture room!). The Palazzo Farnese of the second act took place not in a grand room of state but in a messy, lesser room, once again in a corner perspective for intimacy. Andrea della Valle (in spite of the vivid red wall) but focused his space into a corner where the story could begin in its sordid detail. The richness of narrative context for this Puccini score was of a nineteenth century novel, certainly of a twentieth century romance, and most of all a twenty-first century made-for-television movie.īritish designer Robert Innes Hopkins obliged with a first act set that cannily caught the details of the austere spaces and the coldness of Rome’s St. Stage director Lucy was in complete sympathy, laying out a detail of staging to embody every action of the libretto in minute precision, then embellishing the libretto and music with additional narrative detail to create a seemingly impromptu context for the action and to make the surroundings seem like a everyday spaces where shit probably does sometimes happen. Musically this Tosca was conducted as a new-music score to be laid out in detail, take it or leave it. Conductor Hussain comes from new music, thus he hears this oft repeated score with new ears, sensing and amplifying subtle atmospheres, stabbing with sudden emphasis an orchestral color that embody a word or phrase uttered the stage, carefully erecting the intimacies of the arias and ariosos, pacing the confrontations with unhurried deliberation, settling on sonic brutality with with cold force. Whether by design or accident the pairing of British conductor Leo Hussain with American stage director Shawna Lucey resulted in a synergy of theatrical perspective and musical vision that rarely occurs.
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