When San Francisco Opera Music Director Nicola Luisotti is the pit, the orchestra almost invariably performs with dramatic conviction, momentum, and telling detail. His absence was sorely felt Thursday night, when the company revived its sturdy, time-worn production of Tosca at the War Memorial Opera House. Under conductor Riccardo Frizza’s baton, the score received a slack and surprisingly colorless reading. Despite some potent singing from the principals, this was not a Puccini night to cherish or remember.
If nothing else, it reminded a listener how carefully integrated the elements of this wonderfully constructed opera are. Puccini did so much more than support the singers and drape in orchestral atmosphere as needed. His taut and luscious score urgently advances the plot (based on the Victorien Sardou play), deepens the characters’ emotional complexity, invokes relgious faith, and ignites the flame of political defiance, all while ravishing and beguiling the ear.
Unfortunately, much of that was missing in action here. Listeners had to settle for isolated vocal pleasures and the overall, if overly familiar, felicities of José Maria Condemi’s production on the dark-hued expanses of production designer Thierry Bosquet’s heavily painted sets.
The company debut of Armenian soprano Lianna Haroutounian in the title role was the princical point of new interest. Notably short and compact, she came on like a woman determined to get her full measure — of love, jealous pique, piety, and murderous revenge. Her much taller lover (the strikingly handsome and firm-voiced tenor Brian Jagde as Cavaradossi) and a leering Scarpia (the wickedly inspired baritone Mark Delavan) were going to have their hands full.
Haroutounian delivered immediately and sustained her vocal prowess through an inwardly intense “Vissi d’arte” in the second act and beautifully blended duets with Jagde’s doomed Cavaradossi in the third. Her voice is full of character and vitality. Singing with a house-filling long line and seamless phrasing, Haroutounian made it clear that whether the self-dramatizing actress Tosca is praying or playing coy or collecting a kiss, everyone else needs to sit still and listen.
And so the audience did on opening night, showering her with a well-earned ovation for the famous aria that precedes her stabbing Scarpia to a bloody death. What the audience didn’t get was a fully realized performance. Haroutounian acted largely with her arms, waving and pointing and indicating away. She played Tosca without fully embodying this demanding role of a sulky, spoiled beauty who is driven to an act of passionate desperation.
The Scarpia murder was dramatically studied, its aftermath more fussy than stricken as she placed the candles around the corpse. The soprano did her most persuasive work with Jagde in the third act. The slightly awkward disparity in their heights, which forced the tenor to crane down for an embrace, didn’t matter. Their voices took flight together and fused,
Jagde was a more animated romantic lead, especially in his first act back-and-forth with the lively Sacristan (a fine Dale Travis) and the desperate prison escapee Angelotti (Scott Conner). But he also tended to go a little blank, as if his looks and ringing high notes were enough to get him through. Handsomely sung as it was, his “E lucevan le stelle” stayed earthbound.
Delavan, who has made Scarpia his own, was the evil master of every moment. He thundered and preened and made himself particularly repellent when he pressed his rapacious case with Tosca in a wheedling, mendacious half-whisper. He even showed a flicker of regret at his actions here and there, which only made his manipulations more monstrously human. His borderline ridiculously slimy henchmen, led by a stomach-curdling Joel Soreson’s Spoletta, hit every sniggering note and gesture.
Things never improved much in the pit, although the offstage music in Act 2 was nicely handled. But when the curtain rose on Act 3, which begins with a long orchestral passage, the musical subtext went unread. The anguish and longing that should have been simmering all along remained tepid. It felt as if everyone were killing time until the real killings began.