ETO's
AUTUMN 2005: TOSCA REVIEWS
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.”
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