ETO's AUTUMN 2005: TOSCA REVIEWS I

INDEPENDENT

As for ETO's new Tosca, its principal trio sings pretty splendidly, too, although Sean Ruane as Cavaradossi brings an unnerving beauty of voice, while Michael Bracegirdle - much improved and better focused since his impressive and forceful Don José in Stowe Opera's Carmen - offers more tragic intensity. Craig Smith's hand-wringing Scarpia is a brilliant match for Christopher Lee's Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. Watch closely: he doesn't miss a trick.

OBSERVER

Packs a powerful punch, mainly due to Noel Davies's canny conducting, expert playing from the band

In the title role, Julie Unwin has enough juice in the voice to ride the great climaxes and enough grandeur of manner to convince as the Roman diva capable of wielding a knife when the going gets tough, while Michael Bracegirdle's Cavaradossi seizes his vocal opportunities with some panache. Craig Smith's Baron Scarpia is a slower-burning performance - his show-stopping entrance in the church scene doesn't quite send the required frisson through the house. But the suave menace of his sadistic police chief builds steadily throughout the climactic second act, finally exploding in his attempted rape of Tosca who - as coolly personified by Unwin - sure is ready for him.

THE SUNDAY TIMES

On the opening night of Tosca, conducted with rare intimacy as well as high melodrama by Davies at the Hackney Empire, the curtain went up on Michael Vale’s minimalist, almost abstract black set: a bit of a shock, perhaps, for metropolitan Tosca-watchers weaned on the representational pictorialism of Franco Zeffirelli at Covent Garden, but ETO makes a virtue of necessary economy. The director, Tim Carroll, tells the story with unerring clarity — helped by the excellent English diction of the cast and the words-friendly size of this charming theatre — and he gets performances of unusual subtlety from his principals. Tosca is often derided as a hoary verismo potboiler, but it is one of Puccini’s most tautly constructed scores and, dramatically, is virtually foolproof. Here it worked blissfully well because ETO, to my amazement, had found such a good Tosca.

THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Julie Unwin has a generous gleam to her voice, impeccable intonation, and shapes Tosca's arias exquisitely… her suicide leap was genuinely shocking: a fierce act of resistance, executed with balletic precision.

OPERA MAGAZINE

Puccini’s potboiler packed a powerful punch in Tim Carroll’s straightforward if austere staging, largely thanks to Noel Davies’s wonderfully idiomatic conductiong and Julie Unwin’s spunkily sung Tosca.

Unwin is an experienced Butterfly, but nothing I have previously heard of her prepared me for the outstanding vocal qualities she displayed here… Craig Smith proved an unconventionally dour Scarpia, looking remarkably like Vincent Proce as Count Dracula and entirely believable as a religious biogt who conceals his lust… Oh, the joy of hearing opera in English at the Hackney Empire.”