Bryn Terfel will turn 50 on 9 November, and the Wales Millennium Centre and Welsh National Opera collaborated to mark the occasion. As birthday celebrations go, Puccini’s Tosca is not an obvious choice, 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, with the orchestra and chorus 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 contemporary resonance, with the singers wearing concert performance-style evening dress. Though using a modicum of props, 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, proved herself in the final act. Her Cavaradossi, Teodor Ilincăi, always secure and robust of tone, was ironically colourless when deploying his painter’s palette yet, in approaching death, found shades of emotion altogether more becoming.
Nevertheless, this show belonged to Terfel. Any moments of tenderness in the voice, hinting at Scarpia’s genuine yearning for Tosca, were of course overridden by the sinister, manipulative bully, gestures of brute force somehow less appalling than Scarpia being turned on by Tosca’s pleading for the life of her lover. Conductor Gareth Jones ensured that the audience’s final birthday salute to Terfel, had an anthemic ring. Penblwydd hapus, Bryn!
