Skip to main content

Pittsburgh Opera Stages a Superb Tosca

 

Baron Scarpia (Kyle Albertson) and Floria Tosca (Ana María Martínez  Credit: ‘David Bachman Photography for Pittsburgh Opera’ 


    Tuesday evening, I lumbered into the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh hopeful that the opening of the Pittsburgh Opera’s 86th season would be a stellar one. Tosca was on the menu and I salivated at the idea of seeing it yet again – for the 9th time.

          Since my very early 20s, I’ve been recording most of the cultural events I’ve attended along with the date, but, unfortunately, not the venue. I see now in retrospect that was a mistake because I’ve witnessed opera across the nation as well as a good many in Europe and wish I could identify where I saw a particular performance as well as the date. Paris? Warsaw? Covent Garden? Savonllina? Baltimore? The Met? The Lyric? San Francisco? And so on.

          After catching Tosca Tuesday evening, I headed home to my record book and discovered that this was my ninth Tosca, and I’d have to say, as much as I can recall, that this was the best of the lot. Yay, Pittsburgh!

          From the first emphatic, clarion call notes of the overture, I realized the orchestra was in fine form under the baton of conductor Anthony Walker. As the evening moved on, I was impressed by the quality of the strings, the French horns and the standout solo coming from a mournful clarinet in one particularly lugubrious scene.

          Besides the musical excellence of the orchestra, the sets were some of the most lavish, colorful and tasteful I’ve recently seen in the city. After all, the Farnese Palace deserves special treatment and set designer, Keith Brumley, seems to have spared no effort in getting it right.

  • Floria Tosca (Ana María Martínez) comforts the tortured Mario Cavaradossi (Jonathan Burton)

          Moving on to the cast, I was amazed to see such superb quality assembled on one stage. If you shut your eyes, you’d swear that Jonathan Burton as Cavaradossi is another Luciano Pavarotti. As the title heroine, Tosca, Ana Maria Martinez was excellent. Her Act Two “Vissi d’arte” was a golden moment, a taste of the Beatific Vision, something that literally sent warm and bubbly currents of bliss up my spine. Judging by the response of the audience, her exquisite aria, sung on a darkened stage with a soft spotlight shining only on her, affected much of her listeners the same way.

          For palpable villainy, Kyle Albertson as the chief of police Scarpia played the role of a despicable tyrant to the hilt, all the while mesmerizing the crowd with his powerful baritone.

          Making his Pittsburgh Opera debut, resident artist Erik Nordstrom showed considerable acting and singing skills as the fugitive seeking refuge after escaping from Castel Sant’Angelo, which later served as the third act setting that ended the opera with a sudden and dramatic climax.

          Add to the mix of superlatives the chorus, the children’s chorus and the excellence of the minor characters and you get a Tosca that is one not to miss.  Two more performances remain on October 11 and 13. Treat yourself to some artistic excellence on a rarefied level by logging on to www.pittsburghopera.org.

    Original Costume Design by Andrew Marley with additional designs by Heidi Zamora. Costumes originally created for New York City Opera and refurbished by Seattle Opera Costume Shop

Scenery and Props for this production constructed by Lyric Opera of Kansas City


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sanctified Explores Through Music How Diverse Attitudes are Transformed into an Inspired Unity

  Marissa Lily, Mils James, Manny Walker, Emir Hardy, Chuck Timbers, Cheryl El Walker, Katy Cotten & Brenda Marks Set by Mark Clayton Southers Credit all Photos: Kim El One of the many things live theater does well is taking its audience to different places, times and moods through the power of story-telling. While this is a fairly obvious observation, this thought became especially poignant when, over a period of less than 24 hours, when I found myself on board a battleship in late 18 th century Portsmouth, England, then, 17 hours later, walking into a small Black church in rural South Carolina in the present day. The vehicles for this geographic time travel to places and times worlds apart were Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, “H.M. S. Pinafore” and playwright Javon Johnson’s “Sanctified.” Both works, while musical comedies with morals to the story, came from diverse and rich cultural backgrounds. I’ve already published my review of Pinafore on my arts and enterta...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review of The First Lady- An Autocrat Gets Her Comeuppance

  Elizabeth Elias Huffman as First Lady and Doren Elias as Elish Photo Credit PICT Theatre           PICT Theatre’s U.S. premiere staging of Turkish/French playwright, Sedef Ecer’s, political satire The First Lady opens on a government ministers meeting in a hypothetical country somewhere in Mesopotamia.           Seen on video on a pair of screens on either side of the stage, the trio of officials (Art DeConsillis, Ricardo Vila-Roger and John Dolphin) scramble for a solution to the large-scale demonstrations taking place in the capital streets against their authoritarian regime,           The president has fled the country, and the crisis seems to be growing larger with every passing hour. “What do we do?” they ask one another in desperation.           They decide to enlist the help of the countr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Art of Wise – Antebellum Horror in the Deep South

  Karla C. Payne, Justus Payne, Sheldon Ingram and Adjoa Opoku-Dakwa Credit All Photos:  Credit:  L. Martello/18ricco If you’d want to experience a good example of how those in power use fear as a tool of subjugation, you might want to reserve a ticket or two for the world premiere production of Art of the Wise . The play, the fifth in playwright Mark Clayton Southers’ series of ten works, each set in a different decade of the 19 th century, centers on two families living on a cotton plantation in 1822 Deep South Alabama. Jenny Malarkey, Joseph McGranaghan* and Maddie Kocur The slave owning Wise family is shown in marked contrast to their enslaved cotton field workers, who, as was the custom, took the surname of their master. In the past I’ve said that playwright Southers is one heck of a story teller, and his latest opus follows suit by having a strong narrative that’s both intricately written, intensely entertaining and emotionally rousing. The drama wastes n...
Post a Comment
Read more