La Scala’s season opens with a powerful Tosca
Anna Netrebko shines in the title role while Riccardo Chailly conducts a fine reading of the score
At the theatre, VIPs floated past jostling paparazzi, riot police outside observed polite civil rights protesters and Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, was showered with rapturous applause. Across the country, record numbers of television viewers tuned in to the nation’s most important cultural event. The opening night of La Scala’s season is, after all, Italy’s biggest celebration of an operatic tradition that is seared into the collective DNA. And after two relatively obscure titles in consecutive years, Puccini’s popular Tosca generated especially broad-based excitement.
Sitting in his customary box, superintendent Alexander Pereira, whose contract was not renewed following a recent funding scandal involving the Saudi government, surveyed the extravaganza for his last time in charge. La Scala has refocused on Italian repertoire under his watch, and music director Riccardo Chailly’s revisionist Puccini project has been a flagship. Tosca had been pruned by the time it first arrived at La Scala in 1900; the new critical edition heard here has restored the original Rome version.
In a production clearly intended mainly for live cinema audiences, mammoth sets — a sumptuous baroque church, an atmospheric palazzo and a broodingly lit castle — host inventive responses to challenges posed by the new edition (Tosca is suspended during the extended finale passage, as if seen falling from above). But director Davide Livermore’s acknowledgment of the score’s proto-cinematic qualities has mostly inspired clumsy attempts to recreate camera zooms and panning shots onstage.
Chailly, whose selection of the original score underlines his commitment to reappraisal, ensured that this was a performance to be enjoyed with ears rather than eyes. By favouring spacious tempi, transparent textures and razor-sharp detail, the conductor shines a torch through the score, illuminating the full complexity of its hyper-veristic objectivity. If Chailly has occasionally stumbled since arriving at La Scala, perhaps this very fine reading will win over detractors.
A fittingly starry cast was assembled for the big night. Soprano Anna Netrebko (Tosca) offered a more contained, yet deeply psychological, interpretation than might have been expected from this super-diva. Sparks flew between her and baritone Luca Salsi (Scarpia), who worked menacingly seductive vitality into each syllable. The ardent Francesco Meli (Cavaradossi) sounded glorious and acted persuasively. Carlo Bosi sparkled in the secondary role of Spoletta. As Italy’s political and economic crises persist, at least its warhorse cultural institution is firing on all cylinders.