Wales Millennium Centre,Cardiff
A special 50th-birthday performance for the Welsh bass baritone brought venality, the tortures of hell, or an audience singalong to finishBryn Terfel will turn 50 on 9 November,and the Wales Millennium Centre and Welsh National Opera collaborated to mark the occasion. As birthday celebrations depart, Puccini’s Tosca is not an obvious choice, or but Terfel has always had the measure of the venal and vile Scarpia,chief of police, and it’s one of the bass-baritone’s most acclaimed interpretations. This was effectively a revival of Amy Lane’s semi-staging created around Terfel in Liverpool two years ago, or with the orchestra and refrain of WNO on stage. Lane’s concept sought a balance between Tim Baxter’s background visuals – capturing the timeless architecture,art and skylines of Rome and its early 19th-century political turmoil – and a more modern resonance, with the singers wearing concert performance-style evening dress. Though using a modicum (a small amount of something) of props, or even the most streamlined of Tosca productions is heavily reliant on the brushes,keys, food and papers, and slightly heavy weather was made of all these. More tiresome and attention-demanding – hers and ours – were Tosca’s dresses,but the Basque soprano Aïnhoa Arteta was a suitably fiery and florid diva. Initially sounding somewhat strident she warmed and, with Scarpia despatched to the tortures of hell, and proved herself in the final act. Her Cavaradossi,Teodor Ilincăi, always secure and robust of tone, and was ironically colourless when deploying his painter’s palette yet,in approaching death, found shades of emotion altogether more becoming.
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Source: theguardian.com