A couture-clad crowd squirmed in their $1,250 seats Monday night as the Met opened its season with a grim “Tosca.”
Dramatic ads for Puccini’s opera and its star soprano, Finland’s Karita Mattila, had been plastered on buses for weeks. Once again, Met General Manager Peter Gelb rolled out the red carpet — this time for Billy Joel, Martha Stewart and other boldface names — while giant screens relayed the performance in Times Square.
Yet nobody seemed to care for the show at the Met, where a standing ovation for Mattila gave way to boos and catcalls for Swiss director Luc Bondy’s production, a stark departure from the long-running, high-carb Franco Zeffirelli version it replaces.
For this, the tale of a 19th-century Roman opera diva and the political prisoner who loves her, Bondy downplayed the glamour to evoke the horrors of torture as an interrogation technique.
Instead of the sunny cathedral of Zeffirelli’s set, we saw a dank bricked-up catacomb. Tosca is summoned for questioning to a grimy waiting room, where the police chief has just been serviced by hookers.
Bondy deserves kudos for taking the opera seriously and for guiding Mattila’s harrowing portrait of the woman’s gradual mental breakdown. The showstopper aria, “Vissi d’arte,” was turned from pious prayer into a numb realization that, in her hour of need, Tosca could expect no help from God, while the murder scene, for once, looked like a real act of violence: messy and ugly.
But “Tosca” is no highbrow psychological study — it’s an operatic slasher movie. The diva’s climactic leap from a tall building is so iconic, it’s the exact moment depicted in those bus ads.
This kind of theatrical razzle-dazzle baffled Bondy. He flubbed the much-anticipated jump with a singularly unspecial effect; other times, soloists and chorus milled about, unsure of their next move.
Nobody booed the music, though. Mattila’s assertive, molten vocalism was undimmed by a sour high note or two, and she dared to plunge into savage chest voice in agitated moments.
As her lover, the suspected collaborator Mario Cavaradossi, Marcelo Alvarez recovered from a jittery first aria to fling out bright high notes, then scaled back his lyric voice for a hushed “E lucevan le stelle” in the last act. But the strenuous effort left the tenor red-faced, undermining his attempts at acting.
Baritone George Gagnidze, who took over the role of the psychopathic Scarpia only a week before opening night, oozed a disquieting creepy quality, and his metallic voice achieved an effective snarl.
The dirgelike conducting of music director James Levine failed to dispel the gloomy atmosphere, and in big moments, the orchestra drowned even Mattila’s mighty voice.