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<\/a>But, from my point of view, the evening belongs to Vladislav Sulimsky\u2019s Scarpia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this production, it is hard to imagine a more exact interpreter of the role. Sulimsky, who grew up inside the Soviet system, seems to understand this kind of power not as abstract operatic villainy, but as something historically and psychologically recognisable. His Scarpia is neither a cartoon sadist nor a grand villain from Romantic literature. He is more frightening than that: controlled, bureaucratic, intelligent, almost ordinary. His evil is not theatrical. It is institutional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I worked at the Mariinsky Theatre, Craig Rutenberg \u2014 the former Head of Music at the Metropolitan Opera and a long-time vocal advisor at the Mariinsky \u2014 used to reserve his highest praise for a singer: \u201ca true singing actor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sulimsky is not merely a singer with a beautiful voice and life-giving technique. He is a true singing actor, turning every phrase into dramatic action and allowing every emotional impulse to pass through the voice. There is not a single empty note. A role I know almost by heart suddenly sounded as if it had been written anew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nadja Sofie Eller\u2019s set design and Astrid Klein\u2019s costumes support the concept without over-explaining it. They are beautiful in their exact minimalism. D M Wood\u2019s lighting works in the same logic: it does not overload the production with symbols, but creates a space in which image, rhythm and atmosphere speak more strongly than any declaration. This becomes especially powerful in the third act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I must admit that I have often left Tosca after Act II, but here the third act may be the strongest part of the evening. Without giving too much away, its opening lands like a shot to the heart. What Huffman reveals in Tosca and Cavaradossi is not the romantic aura of “the artist\u201d, but the vulnerability of two ordinary people caught in history: by the end, they are frightened, crushed and infinitely alone. Their \u201cTrionfar!\u201d is no longer a gesture of a triumph, but a solitary human voice in a cold, impersonal space, beside the ditch that will become their common grave. For the first time in my life, I found myself moved to tears \u2014 not because of operatic grandeur, but because the moment suddenly seemed to contain the total helplessness of an ordinary person facing a cynical state machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a Tosca about what power does to human beings: to those who wield it, those who serve it, and those it crushes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I very much hope this production is filmed. It deserves to be seen far beyond Glyndebourne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n