A great pleasure of the performing arts is the opportunity to witness how elastic the classics can be. In opera the same role can transform, again and again, with each new interpreter, even over the lifetime of one singer. It’s a reason to keep coming back.
At the Metropolitan Opera this season, for example, there have been three casts for its revival of Puccini’s “Tosca.” The only thing they have shared is the forced-perspective set of David McVicar’s ornately traditional production.
The first run, at the beginning of the fall, was uneven and largely underpowered. The second, in November, was buzzy, with the mighty soprano Lise Davidsen singing Tosca for the first time at the Met, and the tenor Freddie De Tommaso making his house debut. But it was a bit of a letdown, miscast and lacking the charge of Puccini’s breathless drama.
Well, third cast’s a charm. “Tosca” returned on Thursday in its best form this season, with a triumphant, long overdue return by the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, as well as the return of the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, a peerless Tosca at the Met in recent years, and one of the role’s finest interpreters today.
Terfel has been a Met favorite since the mid-1990s, but bad luck has kept him away from the house for 13 years. He was meant to originate the role of Scarpia in McVicar’s staging when it was new, in the 2017-18 season, but withdrew to have a polyp removed from his vocal cords. Then, not long before the pandemic shut down live performances, he was set to star in a new production of Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer,” but backed out after breaking an ankle.
You could sense a collective sigh of relief on Thursday when Terfel not only made his entrance in Act I, but announced it with booming resonance: truly “con grande autorità,” or with great authority, as the score instructs. His voice, dexterous enough to have owned both Figaro and Wotan at the Met, may have been a touch weary by the end of Act II, but it is still vigorous, and rich with character.
If the Scarpia of Quinn Kelsey, who sang the role in November, was motivated by longing, then Terfel’s runs on power. His villainy changed shape throughout the evening, snarling in the company of cronies and darkly sweet in front of Tosca. Occasionally, Terfel would let madness seep out, flashing wide, white eyes or devolving into animalistic gestures.
This was a performance of extreme detail and nuance, traits Terfel shares with Radvanovsky. At one point, in the showdown of Act II, he lifted her hand to kiss it, then opened his mouth as if to devour it. She pulled away in disgust, and he let out something like a hiss and growl. Neither was singing, but the moment was pure opera.
Radvanovsky approached Tosca with fearlessness and the freedom of a truly inhabited performance. She made you laugh at the start, then broke your heart and made you fear for her, only to flip the script and demand that you fear her. Her signature was the penetrating whisper, the ability to fluctuate volume within a single breath, bringing an anguished cry to a sound both thinly sympathetic and unbreakable at its core.
She brought out the best in the tenor Brian Jagde, as her doomed lover Cavaradossi, who was otherwise the most conventional, but also most assured, singer in that role this season. In the pit, Xian Zhang led a propulsive, even cinematic reading of the score that may have been light on detail but had a death-driven thrill to it.
Zhang’s baton matched the second act’s edge-of-your-seat melodrama. But the difference between routine performances of Tosca and the success of Thursday’s is whether the score’s intensity rises from the pit through the singers like electricity.
When, at the end of Act II, Radvanovsky looked down upon Scarpia’s corpse, she let out the spoken line “And before him all of Rome trembled” with a shattering blend of triumph and tear-streaked despair. This scene alone is reason to return, yet again, to “Tosca.”
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