Tosca        Susan Bullock
Cavaradossi  John Uhlenhopp
Scarpia      Keith Latham
Angelotti    Richard Angas
Sciarrone    Eddie Wade
Spoletta     Aled Hall
Sacristan    Richard Suart
Shepherd boy Dominic Kraemer

Conductor    Peter Robinson
Director     David Freeman

BBC Concert Orchestra

I skipped Raymond Gubbay's Albert Hall Butterfly because Butterfly is
definitely not for me, but I was curious about what a fully commercial
Tosca would look like. David Freeman is not an obvious choice for a popular
production, but he delivered a Butterfly which seemed to pack them in and
be at least tolerable to reviewers. And he's certainly one of the most
inventive directors around.

Tosca turned out to be quite an interesting contrast with the ENO Parsifal.
I saw Parsifal again yesterday, from the worst seat in the house, which
cost me GBP2.50 an hour or so before the performance. A slightly better
seat towards the top of the circle in the Albert Hall cost GPB30, still
more than double a regular Coliseum balcony seat for Parsifal if one had
been available. Though the Albert Hall seats are quite comfortable and the
Coliseum balcony seats aren't.

The audience for both was, interestingly, roughly similar in age as far as
I could tell, probably late forties on average or older, though I don't
think there was much overlap in the audiences. There were perhaps fifteen
coach parties at the Albert Hall, and I had non-English speakers either
side of me, and I think in front (no-one behind).

The other obvious differences were that Tosca was in the round in the
Hall's arena, and the singers were miked, quite effectively on the whole.
The voice didn't always come from where the singer was, but there wasn't
much other distortion tonight.

And of course the productions were strikingly different. Parsifal was
stark, using skeletons as an image of alienation and negation, and
confining the appearance of blood to two shocking stains on white, on the
swan and Amfortas' side. Freeman's Tosca had the decorated mummified
corpses of saints around the church in act 1, a baroque danse macabre on
the composite "church ceiling" painted on the floor of the hall and buckets
of gore, on Angelotti and Cavaradossi, and as red irregular carpets that
appeared in act two and turned into one massive red pool in act three.

Freeman's production in fact went back to the grand guignol conventions of
the original play, and worked very well as a grand shabby little shocker.
The Albert Hall is, perhaps, about the same size as San Andrea, which also
has an echoing void above, and the initial setup filled it with Catholic
paraphernalia (stricto sensu) and incense to create a claustrophobic
atmosphere in a vast space. The fences around the shrines were turned
around to form a single cage for the torture in act two, and Cavaradossi's
prison in act three, both made oppressive by effective lighting and the red
carpets and a red table cover in act two. Tosca took her leap by running up
a flight of steps over the orchestra (which was on the platform) to a
statue of an angel, and disappearing into the organ loft, accompanied by a
gunshot.

The singers were as reliable as expected. Susan Bullock has quite a lot of
substance to her voice and presence, and filled the space dramatically.
Keith Latham was an unsubtle Scarpia, simply violent rather than
insinuating, and John Uhlenhopp was a similarly rough-hewn Cavaradossi,
which is slightly less forgivable but he didn't have much chance for
subtlety in a production like this anyway. Richard Suart's brittle comic
skills didn't have much impact on his performance as the Sacristan, though
the children were all convincingly beastly. The orchestra was a bit
galumphing, but again this wasn't a finely wrought performance in any way.

But it certainly wasn't a bad one. If there hadn't been two intervals, the
performance would have swept you along, and left you feeling suffocated,
mangled and unsure what had hit you. As it was, the cohesion was loosened
by the scene changes (though these were interesting enough to watch in
themselved). But this was definitely a mainstream Tosca, well done. And, as
with Parsifal, the last act went by so quickly I wondered where it had
gone. Of course, that's a far greater achievement with the last act of
Parsifal.