When Chicago’s would-be Tosca, Maria Ewing, abruptly bolted from the Lyric Opera roster last fall, she seemed to leave behind a curse from which the new production of Puccini’s mellifluous melodrama never really recovered. Happily, the curse now has been lifted.
With three new singers taking the principal roles, “Tosca” returned to the Civic Opera House on Saturday for the first of five performances. Maria Guleghina, the Ukrainian soprano making her house debut, by rights should have headed the first cast, so gloriously did she sing the title role. Richard Leech as her lover, Cavaradossi, and Tom Fox as her wannabe seducer, Scarpia, also contributed their share of vocal extravagance to the evening. Given the mediocrity of the production that surrounded them, one had to be grateful for big favors.
The original Tosca when San Francisco Opera premiered the Frank Galati-Tony Walton production in 1992, Guleghina plays the heroine as a take-charge spitfire, driven more by passion and jealousy than vulnerability: a Tosca who firmly believes herself in control of every situation. The voice combines spinto power and bel canto warmth in a manner that sends shivers down the spines of Puccini-lovers. Under pressure, it cuts through the orchestra like a gleaming knife-steady and true-while her soft singing drains every drop of pathos from Tosca’s show-stopping “Vissi d’arte.”
Guleghina looks glamorous and her acting style is calculated to carry well in a theater the size of the Civic Opera House. So fiercely compelling was Tosca’s dance of death with Scarpia that it was hard to say who was stalking whom. A few moments of erratic pitch and unfocused tone were a small price to pay for such a committed performance, quite the finest Tosca Lyric has brought us in years.
Leech’s painter-turned-freedom fighter sounded most of the time like a more-than-reasonable facsimile of a middleweight Puccini tenor. He plunged into “Recondita armonia” before the voice was warmed, hitting his tenoral stride in the second act (where his high notes rang easily and firmly) and had enough beautiful sound in reserve to deliver “E lucevan le stelle” with crowd-pleasing intensity.
Fox’s portrayal of Scarpia as a spidery sadist made up in fine gestural detail what it lacked in sheer vocal amplitude. In short, his lean baritone took on a threatening quality that made the police chief seem more than just another evil bully: the aristocrat as icy-veined killer. Also new to the cast was Philip Skinner, who delivered an uncommonly well-sung Angelotti. Sturdy conducting by Bruno Bartoletti and solid orchestral playing supported the taut progress of the drama.
Whatever conceptual points Galati wished to make with this production he seems to have abandoned. It’s now a conventionally realistic “Tosca,” enacted within designer Walton’s cramped, unspeakably ugly sets.
