Puccini - Tosca (Belfast, 2023)

Giacomo Puccini - Tosca

Northern Ireland Opera, 2023

Eduardo Strausser, Cameron Menzies, Svetlana Kasyan, Peter Auty, Brendan Collins, Matthew Durkan, Niall Anderson, Aaron O'Hare, Connor Campbell, Paul McQuillan, Mollie Lucas, Alexa Thompson

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 12th September 2023

You can't go wrong with Tosca and not going wrong is important to a company like Northern Ireland Opera, a company trying to get on its feet again after the pandemic, in a time of cuts to arts budgets and with no working Assembly in place in Stormont. Tosca is also a safe bet, like the previous two operas staged by NIO, La Bohème and La Traviata, neither of which inspired me to go and see live opera in my home town. But then it strikes me that NIO are not appealing to an opera audience - which is probably indeed limited here - but, as collaborations with musicals at the Lyric Theatre suggest, aiming to win over a certain class of theatre-going audience. Even then, there is a presumption that even there isn't a large enough audience or budget to put on more than one full scale opera a year. Oliver Mears, who directed the company with a more ambitious programme from 2011 to 2018, might disagree with that, but clearly we are in different times.

Tosca however strikes me as being a good test to judge how successfully an opera company might be able to meet its current challenges. It's a perfectly calibrated drama with music scored for maximum impact on those dramatic points, with carefully placed arias in each act and each act delivering a highly charged emotional climax. The good news is that Cameron Menzies's production rightly went for spectacle and impact and delivered on expectations for this opera. I originally typed 'minimum expectations' there, but I suppose that is subjective and dependent on what you expect from this opera. As far as the majority of the audience are concerned, which is more important, it delivered pure operatic drama. As far as expectations for commercial viability, NIO also delivered four sold out shows. You can't reasonably ask for more than within the current limitations, but there is surely a case for suggesting that four performances of one full-scale opera a year must be considered a bare minimum.

Whatever budget the Northern Ireland Opera had been allocated for Tosca, it was however well used in Niall McKeever's decoration of the elaborate stage set. In the past NIO would take Tosca to site specific locations and a new audience in Derry/Londonderry and bring a meaningful context to the story as a way of illustrating its power. If you're only going to put on one full-length opera a year in Belfast to appeal to a regular theatre-going audience hoping attract future funding, donations and investment, you might as well make it impressive. Act 1 of Tosca does look very impressive, the portrait of the Madonna encased in a huge circular stone frame, looking something like a fresco in the dome of a cathedral. Other than that though, the setting was worryingly unimaginative, sticking close to the original period and stage directions with scaffolding, naves and the Angelotti private chapel. Still, when you have room for the chorus of nuns and altar-boys filling the stage for the Te Deum and the Ulster Orchestra booming it out to the audience, there's no ground for complaint at the effectiveness of the direction here.

Any concerns about this being a staid by-the-book production were put aside as Menzies had more up his sleeve for the sets and continuity between them through Act II and Act III. The surrounding scaffolding remained in place for no meaningful reason other than perhaps for it being difficult to move, but the period is less easily tied down. Scarpia's dining room sits on a raised platform looking like it was fitted by IKEA, with a huge backdrop of a topless woman throwing off what looks like a transparent veil. Visually this worked well, not just to put Scarpa's lust up in the stage (this would hardly be needed considering the expression of the libretto and the score), but it also provided good sightlines so that everyone in the Grand Opera House could get a good view of one of the most powerful scenes in the opera repertoire (not to mention the Act III finale, which is similarly very well staged). This also serves to bring the opera's themes into a more contemporary post-#MeToo age, and there is after all no reason why it should hark back to the troubled history of the province as the Oliver Mears's production did. Different times, different audience, different requirements to achieve the necessary impact. It's not as if Puccini's Tosca was any kind of commentary on police and politics of its time.

Act III likewise found a novel and effective way to present that all-important Castel St. Angelo finale by having Cavaradossi led onto a raised gallows-like platform for execution, the firing squad taking aim from the surrounding scaffolding. The stone circle is present behind this, looking like a deep void into which the heroine plunges at the conclusion. It could hardly be more dramatic. Arguably the scene could hardly fail to be, but I have seen productions where it has been less effective than it should be. The audience were suitably impressed here, and from some reactions I heard, taken totally by surprise.

I wasn't totally won over by the singing. Peter Auty singing Cavaradossi has a beautiful dramatic tenor line, but the challenges of hitting and sustaining the high notes showed. He hit them consistently of course but I found myself wincing and willing him on. Russian soprano Svetlana Kasyan had no trouble with the high notes, sustaining them or projecting them to the back of the opera house, but the accuracy of her notes was inconsistent and I'm afraid the clarity of her diction wasn't strong. Floria Tosca is a big challenge however and Kasyan commanded attention as the diva and in a strong 'Vissi d'arte'. Brendan Collins was an effective Scarpia, never resorting to pantomime bad-guy swaggering, but a bigger baritone voice is needed to really deliver that villainous bile.

Tosca is not just all about love, sex, violence, betrayal and murder between the three major roles, and it's not just a showcase for a leading soprano, tenor and baritone, or at least it doesn't have to be. Personally I enjoyed some of the little touches and smaller roles more than the big ones and Puccini adds plenty of other colour and detail in the likes of the scene stealing chorus Te Deum finale to Act I, although that is hardly what you would call a little touch. Niall Anderson's sacristan and the shepherd heard (and seen) on the streets of Rome at the beginning of Act III (either Mollie Lucas or Alexa Thompson) sang well and it's a credit to the casting and direction that attention was paid to these details.

As it was to the orchestration. It's always a pleasure to hear the Ulster Orchestra play and conducted by Eduardo Strausser, Puccini's score wasn't too shabby about delivering its notorious shocks, musical as well as dramatic. Tosca is a great opera and, albeit with minor misgivings, I enjoyed this performance. It was also nice to see opera at the Grand Opera House in Belfast again - even the touring companies have abandoned us. It would be a shame if we have to wait another year for the next one.

External links: Northern Ireland Opera

Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin (Belfast, 2018)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin

Scottish Opera, 2018

Stuart Stratford, Oliver Mears, Samuel Dale Johnson, Natalya Romaniw, Peter Auty, Sioned Gwen Davies, Alison Kettlewell, Anne-Marie Owens, Graeme Broadbent, Christopher Gillett, Alexey Gusev, James Platt, Matthew Kimble

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 28 June 2018

Pushkin's Eugene Onegin has been praised as "an encyclopaedia of Russian life" but it's one of those works that manages to encapsulate the characteristics and behaviours of a nation within a story of the intimate sadness and tragic fate that life holds in store for many of us. Pushkin wrote his own tragic Russian story, killed in a duel over a romantic dispute like Lensky in his great masterpiece, and Tchaikovsky poured his own personal, marital and emotional struggles into his work here, and the personal input of both creators can be deeply felt in Eugene Onegin.

It's not much to ask to have that reflected and expect to feel deeply moved by a performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and while it rarely fails to hit the mark, there are many ways of approaching the subject. At one extreme you can have Stefan Herheim turning the work indeed into "an encyclopaedia of Russian life" complete with cosmonauts, Red Army troops and a dancing bear taking it right up to the present day, making the point that the Russian character - as well as the essential human character - remains largely unchanged. At the other minimalist extreme, Robert Carsen ties the emotional impact of the work and the course of a life to the colours of the seasons. Others, such as Krzysztof Warlikowski, have focussed on how much of Tchaikovsky's life and troubled sexual identity can be clearly mapped onto the characters in the story.

Oliver Mears, the current artistic director of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and former director of NI Opera, makes a return visit with his Scottish Opera production of Eugene Onegin and doesn't attempt anything quite as radical as the above examples, but in another way it taps into the idea of simple lives caught up in something greater. What it does manage to do is grasp that sense of the scope of life and love, of the personal and intimate placed within the greater context of life, memory and the passing of time; the madness and insensitivity of youth that can have an impact that resonates through a whole life and that we can only grasp the enormity of it when it's far too late to change anything.

Mears employs a simple enough device to get this across, having the silent figure of an elderly Tatyana recall and rewatch a significant event in her youth that would forever determine its future direction, all of it taking place in a single room of fading memory. I was immediately resistant to the idea, since the ending in Tchaikovsky's opera - and the melancholic tone of the work throughout - already places the work into the context of memory and the passing of time. Tatyana's rejection of the repentant Onegin at the end of the opera, even though she is clearly in love with him, is an immensely powerful conclusion that could hardly be delivered in a more effective manner with the addition of another rejection of Tatyana finally tearing up the letter and forever setting the matter to rest.

On the other hand it's quite plausible that the matter between Tatyana and Onegin might certainly be over, but both will still carry the regret for the rest of their lives. If it doesn't make the conclusion any more devastating, it succeeds in driving the point home, particularly as Stuart Stratford and the Scottish Opera Orchestra deliver the final blows mercilessly after succeeding in holding the audience in a state of romantic melancholy for the larger part of the performance, conserving those energies for the other real moments of emotional impact; in Onegin's rejection of Tatyana's love letter and in the tragic and foolhardy death of Lensky in the duel.

There are other ways of showing how we can end up paying for the folly of youth later in life, but most obviously it's Onegin who carries this burden. One of the best ways I've seen this done is in the 2013 Royal Opera House production, where Onegin is led during the Polonaise on a dance through a constant progression of women that gradually wears him down with the passing of the years. It leaves him in the perfect state to have his eyes opened to the opportunities of real love and stability in his life that have been lost. Interestingly, with an elderly Tatyana coming back to a dusty, decaying Larin mansion, once filled with life, Mears's direction makes you consider everything else that has been lost over time. For the first time really the Lensky's tragedy carried through for me, and I wondered what had become of Olga and the direction her life subsequently must have taken. Would Lensky's death have stayed with her or would the memory have faded with time and the other needs of life?

It's essential that, like Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, the reader or listener identify with the characters in the story and see their lives in that kind of context; Onegin as tragedy plus time. By casting the net of time further - Herheim's production certainly does this, and so too does Kasper Holten's doubling of the older Tatyana and Onegin looking back on their younger counterparts - Oliver Mears captures that sense of the work not so much as an encyclopaedia of Russian life, but just an encyclopaedia of life. There are many perspectives you can place on Eugene Onegin, but the most important one is what the individual listener and spectator brings to it; and the passing of time, the changes it brings and the regrets that still sting are something that everyone can relate to.

That's not to say that the viewer has to do all the work. Far from it. While the perspective Oliver Mears introduces sets the work in a wider context, Stuart Stratford and the Scottish Opera Orchestra permit the listener to feel the heat of life and the complexity of sentiments associated with it in every note of Tchaikovsky's beautiful melodies and dances. The singing and characterisation are critical however, particularly for Tatyana and Onegin, and the casting was nigh on perfect here. Natalya Romaniw was simply stunning. If she was a little blank and cool in her acting, frozen mortification works well for Tatyana, and all the yearning was there in a superbly sung performance. She had a perfect counterfoil in Samuel Dale Johnson's Onegin, initially aloof (making an entrance on a live horse!) and little by little falling prey to his own personality flaws. There were certainly no flaws in his singing. The quality of singing and characterisation of Olga and Lensky by Sioned Gwen Davies and Peter Auty was evident in how much you cared about their fates.

Eugene Onegin can sometimes risk being a little aloof and cool in its mannerisms of detachment if the music and singing aren't all perfectly aligned to bring out the true sentiments. That necessarily goes beyond the principals, the larger picture of life and the impact of time extending to the supporting characters, from Madame Larina and the nurse Filippyevna's views and life experiences, to Prince Gremin's reflections on married life and love later in life. The chorus, the dancers, also all contribute to the sense of life viewed comprehensively in all its richness, but with an underlying melancholy for the impact of that time exerts on it. Everything that is great about Eugene Onegin comes together perfectly in this Scottish Opera production.

Links: Scottish Opera