Donizetti’s bouncy melodic score features bel canto (beautiful singing) arias. Nicole Cabell, as the love maidenAdina, sings her desires deftly while Gabrielle Vivani, as the blusterous Sergent Belcore, demonstrates his vocal chops. Alessandro Corbelli is the delightful Dr. Dulcamara who convinces the clueless Nemorino that he indeed has the elixir of love.
Tosca is so romantic, so melodic and so emotional that I was completely enchanted from the early romantic duet arias. I was impressed by the rich vocals from Violeta Urmana and the smooth fluid tenor chops from Marco Berti as Tosca’s lover, Mario Cavaradossi. Lucio Gallao is the deliciously cunning villain, Baron Scarpia.
…the Lyric Opera’s melodic production is a most pleasant experience. Lehar’s melodies and songs – “Vilja”, “The Merry Widow Waltz”, “You’ll Find Me At Maxim’s” and “Every Woman” never sounded better than under conductor Emmanuel Villaume’s deft leadership of the Lyric orchestra.
Writing in 1921, Janáček benefits from early explorations of human psychology and creates a moving drama devoid of excess. Katya may be of the same lineage as Madama Butterfly, but Janáček trims the fat to make his opera just over 2 hours with intermission. Lyric’s production mirrors the sparseness, affording the drama more psychological space in which to explore.
Musically and dramatically, Verdi fails to tell a coherent story. He steals from the previous generation of composers, notably Donizetti, to write light dances and marches to accompany both joy and despair
The music was ostensibly difficult but seemed mostly natural in the voices of the singers. The minion of hell seemed sardonically off-key, but it seemed to suit his character. The majority of the music was a thinly layered texture of subtly dissonant melodic fragments.
The hands-down star of this production is in the title role: Polish tenor Piotr Beczala radiates with his character’s ill-begotten youthful vigor but tempers it with moments of vile selfishness reminiscent of his previous life as a suicidal curmudgeon.
I recommend this opera for anyone who has been flirting with opera but has not yet fallen head-over-heels. Like all opera, you have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but Tosca is certainly more realistic, more believable, than most. It requires a certain amount of imagination in order to be able to empathize with the characters and to be able to fuse together the music with the action on stage.
Overall, the opera seemed like it was written by a gifted composer who had not yet solved all the dramatic problems set up by the unholy marriage of punk England to ancient Greek drama.
While the plot seems relatively uninspired, the music keeps your attention with a diversity of styles and textures. Britten’s interest in atonality comes through during more conversational moments when the vocal lines can seem almost awkward and unmusical, but these passages are balanced by a couple beautiful more diatonic arias.