Vancouver Opera's Tosca: Fine Voices, Timid Politics

Vancouver Opera opened its new production of Puccini's Tosca on October 24, days after an ultra-right Conservative landslide in British Columbia's provincial election. The timing could hardly have been sharper. The performance arrived on the heels of a scandal at Calgary Opera, where bass Gabriel Sanchez Ortega — playing the political prisoner Cesare Angelotti — was fired for unfurling a Palestinian flag during his opening-night curtain call, with protesters appearing on closing night.

The reviewer for OperaWire found the Vancouver production, a co-production with Pacific Opera Victoria directed by Brenna Corner, wanting. "While there were some lovely performances, the direction by Brenna Corner, Director of Pacific Opera Victoria, lacked spark and the co-production between the two companies meandered into a kind of languid melancholy that failed to rise to the historical and actual moment."

Puccini set his 1900 opera, based on Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca, in Rome in 1800, as Napoleon's invasion of Italy threatened the Kingdom of Naples's grip on the city. The reviewer judged the staging a missed opportunity at a moment when, in the critic's words, "so many Scarpia type villains abound."

What does this change for audiences?

For Vancouver audiences, it means a beautiful but muted evening. The production opened promisingly. Kevin Knight's historically accurate sets and costumes were stunning. But the last two acts, in the reviewer's words, "fell into a kind of dramatic stupor." The critic concluded: "It was all very pretty, but hardly an urgent anthem to the end of tyranny. Perhaps it was a kinder, gentler Canadian version of Tosca — where passion gave way to introspection — but it was not the gentleman I was expecting."

The comparison was fresh: the reviewer had seen Ted Hoffman's Tosca at Glyndebourne this past June, a version set in Mussolini's Italy and inspired by Rossellini's Roma città aperta, staged while a right-wing march in nearby Brighton was foiled by an antifascist carnival. That production, the critic wrote, was tight, well-choreographed and "an impassioned hyper-relevant cry against fascism." Vancouver's did not match it.

Who stood out on stage?

Lebanese-Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury led the cast as Floria Tosca. The winner of the 2022 Maria Callas Debut Artist of the Year award, for her Dallas Opera debut as Leïla in Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, she brought a thrilling lyric voice and the dramatic range to carry Tosca from peace-loving artist to resistance fighter. Her "Vissi d'arte" was poignantly performed, and her voice "soared over these dramatic difficulties."

Tenor David Pomeroy, as the revolutionary painter Mario Cavaradossi, took a while to warm up on opening night. His Act Three "E lucevan le stelle" was a highlight, making the condemned man's memories "genuinely moving through his expressive tenor." Gregory Dahl's Scarpia was "an excellent villain," his full-throated baritone suggesting, in the critic's words, "a Trumpian chill" while almost drawing empathy as he pleaded for his life.

The production benefited from Scott Reid's set and video design, with larger-than-life shadows; Michael Walton's lighting, which bathed the stage in rose; a compelling local children's choir; and a pristine boy soprano's Shepherd's Song. Jacques Lacombe conducted expertly.

Was the direction convincing?

Not entirely. Corner, in a local interview, described Tosca as a "woman (who) is more powerful than her world lets her be." The reviewer saw instead an "avenging Madonna," kneeling in forgiveness over Scarpia's body, when anger was called for. The shadow images of Cavaradossi's torture gestured at making the audience complicit voyeurs of violence — "a possibly very contemporary doom scrolling reference" — but never moved beyond suggestion. The tragic climax, Tosca's cry of "O Scarpia, avanti a Dio," was "smothered in sanctimony rather than performed with passion" and left the critic strangely unmoved. An opera about violence, lust, revolution and idealism "ended with a whimper rather than a bang."

The reviewer closed with a sharper point: as a new, arts-funding-slashing conservative regime takes power in British Columbia, Tosca's words — "I lived for art, I lived for love" — take on a whole new meaning.