I won a couple of tickets to Welsh National Opera’s Tosca via a competition on Twitter! This allowed us to go to a performance in Cardiff, with front-row seats in the circle and champagne and nibbles also available courtesy of Lanson who sponsored the production.
Tosca was in fact the first opera I ever went to, in a Glyndebourne touring production in Oxford.
The staging was faithful to the period, although I thought the costumes perhaps dated from a slightly later one, and the portrait was definitely in the wrong style, and so large that it was hard to avoid looking at it! The usual beautifully graded WNO lighting change happened at dawn in Act 3.
All the roles were well sung, although Cavaradossi didn’t have quite as much punch at the top as we’d have liked. If you want more detail, my daughter has written it up in her blog. One oddity was that the offstage shepherd boy at the opening of Act 3 was apparently sung by an adult singer, which didn’t really work. Perhaps they have had similar problems to those which prevented a boy alto soloist singing on the Last Night of the Proms this year. And while the chorus were in good voice, they still moved like people who’d been told to be in precise positions at any given moment (as did Tosca at times).
The evening ended with the most enthusiastic curtain call I’ve ever seen at an opera – a positive hokey-cokey!
As this was a revival it didn’t get many reviews but here are a couple: