Photograph: Pieter Claes
My final opera of the 2025–2026 season — assuming Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe in Pesaro this coming August doesn’t rely — was Rafael R. Villalobos’s manufacturing of Tosca, in Brussels. This isn’t new at La Monnaie, however when it first appeared there in 2021 it was, like this season’s Norma, severely hit by Covid restrictions, and so attended by just a few. I’d beforehand solely seen the director’s Hänsel und Gretel, or on this case Jancsi és Juliska, carried out in Hungarian in Budapest. That was practically ten years in the past. However as he’s, unusually, a director I’ve truly met (you’ll be able to rely on the fingers of 1 hand the opera professionals I do know personally), and I’ve adopted his profession with curiosity since. Whereas his cheerful updating of the Humperdinck was solely sparsely contested on the Erkel Theatre, I’m conscious that in Barcelona, for instance (this being a coproduction with Montpellier, Barcelona and Seville), his Tosca gave rise what one critic referred to as a “monumental boo,” of a sort “not heard there in twenty years.”
Why?
Properly in fact it might simply have been that the viewers had anticipated a extra conventional Tosca, although by now, in Barcelona, that appears unlikely. Maybe it was as a result of his tackle the work is just too difficult, with a sure piling-on of concepts prompt to him by the story. To me, as staged, it doesn’t truly stay as much as the ambitions laid out on La Monnaie’s web site and within the copious programme notes. (La Monnaie’s programmes usually are not only a flimsy leaflet stuffed with adverts for jewellery and scent, however two sturdy volumes, one containing solid particulars, the plot, bilingual essays, and pictures, and one other the entire libretto, within the authentic language, plus French and Flemish.)
Extra particularly, although, so far as I do know, what was most loudly booed on the Liceu was a scene acted out in silence, proper after the interval, in a field beside the stage: a tiff of kinds between an actor trying like Pier Paolo Pasolini and a curly-haired youth, maybe Pino Pelosi, his alleged murderer. As a result of sure, a Pasolini lookalike is current on stage, and the manufacturing refers, explicitly if (thank goodness) surprisingly tamely, to the director’s Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma.
Villalobos ingeniously hyperlinks Pasolini to all three of the opera’s important characters. “This nice artist,” he writes in one of many program essays, “considered an enemy of the federal government, was persecuted by the exact same establishments of energy as these depicted in Victorien Sardou’s play.” In line with certainly one of a number of quotations from Pasolini projected through the manufacturing, “The second he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, as a result of opening his mouth is all the time scandalous.” So within the painter Mario, we see one side of the cineaste.
The title of Villalobos’s essay, Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, refers as a lot to Mario (although in a unique sense) as to Scarpia: “For my part there’s a shut parallel between the sadomasochistic but extremely poetic world of Salò and the second act of Tosca.” In Scarpia, we see a second side of Pasolini.
Then in Tosca herself, we see a 3rd. The manufacturing, Villalobos tells us, offers with worry, religion, and lack of religion — each Tosca’s and Pasolini’s. “I could also be an unbeliever, however I’m an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a perception,” is one other citation projected through the manufacturing. The three acts are supposed to replicate Tosca’s progress from naive, unthinking perception within the first, by shock and incipient doubt within the second, to “the post-traumatic alienation” of the third.
For good measure, Romans 8 (“Whom he did predestinate, them he additionally referred to as: and whom he referred to as, them he additionally justified: and whom he justified, them he additionally glorified”) and Victor Hugo’s The Pope (“Le sceptre est useless, le trône est noir, la pourpre est vile”) are additionally convoked.
There’s one primary set. A modular central house on stage is fashioned, below a hoop of neon, by two concentric, rotating half-rotundas, the outer one a collection of strong white arches impressed by Italian fascist structure, the inside one, repeating the arches, a white metal framework, a kind of pergola. As every is open to at least one facet, because the one rotates across the different, they supply the required scene modifications and entries and exits. Every act entails monumental work, specifically commissioned from Andalucian artist Santiago Ydáñez: an enormous Madonna, big nudes filling the arches, changed, because the set shifts, by snarling canines, a Judith and Holofernes impressed by Caravaggio.
The primary act’s staggering, long-haired Angelotti is on his final legs. To color, Mario wears a white shirt and gray swimsuit trousers, like no artist I’ve ever seen at work. Tosca enters in a trouser-suit and an absurdly broad-brimmed, floppy hat, all black, carrying a number of Chanel-style buying luggage. She is coquettish, however solemnly lays a bouquet of lilies on the toes of a chalk-white statue of the Virgin. The louche, often vicious sacristan entertains an ambiguous relationship together with his three choirboys, near-naked below semi-transparent shifts. Throughout their horseplay, simply as Scarpia seems buttoned up in slim, undertaker black, certainly one of them is stripped to his underpants.
In an interview on-line, Villalobos assures us the plot is performed out straightforwardly, and largely it’s. However on the finish of the act there’s no procession and certainly no refrain on stage in any respect: they’re saved within the wings. And there’s no cardinal, both, however Tosca sails in on the rear (like, I believed incongruously, the Marschallin displaying up on the inn) in a stiff white robe that clearly however mysteriously remembers a Pope — Scarpia, in spite of everything, is holding a mitre. Whereas Pasolini hovers within the background, she turns to go away and divulges a cranium painted on the again.
Photograph: Pieter Claes
Within the central act, equally unexpectedly, she enters in shoulder-caped, cardinal crimson robes, earlier than shucking them off to stay in a easy, black costume. Scarpia washes her toes. That is the Salò act, so the choirboys, now bare and carrying lilies like those Tosca laid on the Virgin’s toes, are topic to the (simulated) sado-masochistic attentions of Scarpia’s good-looking however loutish sbirri. And that is the act the place, as Mario is tortured, and the Pasolini-inspired standing nudes are changed by these snarling hounds.
The act three set is at its barest. The rotundas successfully recall the round citadel, and bear the phrases ROMA O MORTE in white neon. The “post-traumatic alienation” is expressed in Tosca’s exaggerated laughter and screams. On the finish, as in another up to date productions, quite than leaping off the mausoleum, she walks off slowly into clouds of brightly-lit stage smoke.
I gained’t declare that every one this directorial “equipment”, so to talk, is mistaken or misguided, however sadly Villalobos doesn’t make it work convincingly. In print, he presents his concepts with conviction, however the end result on stage appears by some means half-hearted. Ultimately it had me questioning whether or not Tosca isn’t simply apparent sufficient because it stands (Sardou was seen, so I’ve learn, as a very environment friendly playwright), and as such, a doubtful candidate for conceptualization.
However then… we had been simply rising from the most well liked June heatwave Europe has ever skilled, and it was nonetheless, on Sunday, a heat afternoon. Who is aware of what it felt like, for the solid, to be costumed up below theatre lights on stage? Additionally, as I’ve typically mentioned about these Brussels matinees, not all singers are at their finest simply after lunch. This is the reason I hesitate to say how I felt in regards to the singing. Listed below are my trustworthy ideas.
Paolo Orecchia was a firmer-sounding, much less decrepit sagrestano than we frequently get, and as Angelotti, Li Huanhong sounded an awesome deal more healthy than the manufacturing had him look.
Stefano La Colla (Mario) is, as somebody better-qualified than I’m mentioned to me later, little doubt a serviceable singer. He hits all of the notes, largely loudly; he’s the “can belto” form, not likely minimize out for loving tenderness. His decrease and center vary has, to my ear, a barely hole sound, and his high thins out to a metallic twine. His means of sliding down from it, one thing he does greater than as soon as, with that steely sound and no vibrato, is ugly. He makes use of the irritating, showy trick of ending his hit numbers with a crescendo on the ultimate observe, and the younger Canadian conductor Jordan de Souza made the error of giving him “live performance” endings, i.e. bringing the orchestra to a halt after them. Sadly, on the finish of “Recondita armonia”, the viewers remained silent.
Photograph: Pieter Claes
Lucio Gallo (Scarpia) is a strong, darkish baritone (bass, I’d even have supposed), whose expertise exhibits. He appears most snug on the high of his vary; when agitated his intonation within the medium sounds unruly. He was, I believed, the perfect on this solid.
Leah Hawkins (Tosca) has a darkish, chesty decrease vary and a smoky, virtually husky medium. Her voice isn’t wholly constant; her high notes are extra these of a powerful lyric soprano than a dramatic one. It felt as if she saved her finest for “Vissi d’arte”, which I suppose is comprehensible. She isn’t the primary and gained’t be the final. I’m unsure, although, she has fairly the vocal heft, from backside to high, for the function.
De Souza’s method to the rating was extra brash and “in-your-face” quite than various and refined, which is a technique of approaching Tosca, although at instances, that being mentioned, he might at instances nonetheless have injected extra vigor and drive into it.
I’m afraid all this comes throughout as too bleakly detrimental. The solid had been all fairly sturdy and visibly dedicated, but… this wasn’t actually an international-class Tosca. Leaving the home, my neighbor and I concluded that, taken as an entire, regardless of the singers’ deserves, none of it had truly given us any pleasure. A disappointing conclusion to a Tosca, and on this case, to the season.
