Puccini’s “Tosca,” at least from one perspective, would seem to be an opera about a tyrant who uses his power to suppress political dissent and sexually assault women — and how he finally gets his comeuppance, at huge personal cost to everyone around him.
If only it had anything to tell us about contemporary life!
Nothing quite so engaging is astir, unfortunately, in the capable but somnolent new production that opened on Wednesday, Oct. 3, at the San Francisco Opera. In this version, opera is once again a matter of handsomely costumed performers striking poses as they pour out their hearts in a stream of ornate melody.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t present much of an argument for returning time and again to the same small sliver of repertoire (“Tosca” was last performed at the War Memorial Opera House a scant four years ago). There are currents of political and erotic intrigue in this piece — crude, admittedly, but genuine — that are scarcely touched on here, and when those threads are so faintly illuminated, the whole affair can feel fairly bland.
This is not in itself an argument for updated stagings, or for a literal-minded connect-the-dots approach that makes old repertoire speak to contemporary concerns. It’s something more elemental — the desire that any new production should have a clear reason for being.
The point of this new “Tosca,” from all the evidence, is the chance to hear the Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio making her company debut, singing the title role for the first time in her career. On Wednesday, Giannattasio came through with an impressive performance, marked by theatrical majesty, technical assurance and rich vocal colorations.
It was clear from the start that Giannattasio had enough control over the musical demands of the role to channel it in whatever direction she desired. Her Act 1 interactions with her beloved Cavaradossi were infused with a combination of coquettish intimacy and headstrong jealousy. She sang the Act 2 showpiece “Vissi d’arte” — as close to a moral reckoning as Tosca can get through the miasma of her self-pity — with touching poignancy.
Best of all, Giannattasio has a potent upper register that she lets fly with arresting freedom, unleashing a wondrous torrent of sound without ever losing her grip on the phrasing of a melody. She’s got star power, and she knows how to use it.
But Giannattasio, for all her charisma, can lapse into dramatic blankness at key moments. And not even her vocal brilliance was enough to carry the evening alone.
The company has billed this production, directed by Shawna Lucey and designed by Robert Innes Hopkins and Michael James Clark, as a new one, coming on the heels of a physical production that served San Francisco in one form or another for decades.
But the term “new” is doing a lot of work in that formulation. Once again, we are in a Roman church during the Napoleonic Wars, then an opulent chamber and finally the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo; they’re not the same sets, but they might as well be. Someone went to a lot of effort to make sure that the characters in Act 1 could enter from stage right instead of stage left.
The offering feels familiar in other ways as well. Brian Jagde, evidently the only tenor known to the Opera’s artistic staff, is back to sing Cavaradossi for the third time, amid other similar assignments.
On Wednesday, he handled the role with distinction, bringing ardor and vocal bloom to the big arias in Acts 1 and 3, and facing off nobly against the forces of right-wing oppression in Act 2. Yet the idea that he’s the only tenor capable of singing Puccini’s music seems a little far-fetched.
At the third point of the triangle, baritone Scott Hendricks struggled to make an impact as the evil police captain Baron Scarpia, in a thinly scaled performance more evocative of oily insinuation than genuine villainy. Hadleigh Adams was a heroic Angelotti, and there were welcome returns by company stalwarts Dale Travis (a witty Sacristan) and Joel Sorensen (the slimy henchman Spoletta).
In a season of guest conductors presumably vying to succeed Nicola Luisotti as music director, the debuting Englishman Leo Hussain left a mixed impression. On one hand, he drew playing of breathtaking beauty and clarity from the Opera Orchestra; I don’t know when I’ve heard such fine-grained, elaborate textures emerge from the pit.
But Hussain insisted throughout on slow, finicky tempos and phrasing, as if he wanted to make sure to suck every drop of juice from each measure of music before proceeding to the next one. That meant both breaking down Puccini’s sumptuous melodic lines into atomized strings of individual notes, and draining the theatrical life out of some of the opera’s critical moments.
Most notably, Act 2 sputtered to a weak and dispiriting close after Tosca managed to drive a knife into Scarpia’s heart. In the final moments, Giannattasio merely puttered around the apartment, tidying up and taking care of this and that; at Hussain’s languorous tempo she could have easily fixed herself a ham sandwich for the road.
“Tosca”: Through Oct. 30. $26-$370. War Memorial Opera House. Event Details