Stream: ‘Tosca’
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden - 15/12/21
A new star has arrived!
Over 50 years of opera going, I must have seen Tosca more than a hundred times. Normally I wouldn’t bother with a cinema screening of the Covent Garden ‘Tosca’, but tonight was special, a new star was on show and he proved to be wonderful. I’m talking of course of the young British tenor Freddie De Tommaso (yes he has an Italian father), who shot to fame last week when he stood in halfway through for Bryan Hymel (who had a cold) at the opening night of ‘Tosca’. He got rave reviews from the critics and I was curious to see whether he would live up to that standard, particularly during the live streaming when close-ups can expose your acting as well as your voice. Well he did, and I can confidently say I think he is the finest British tenor since the days of Charles Craig in his prime back in the 1960’s.
I know the Covent Garden production of ‘Tosca’ by Jonathan Kent well; it is a very handsome production, with the three scenes of the opera set in Rome. I was surprised when I went to book my seat at the Cameo in Edinburgh to discover only a dozen seats had been sold in a cinema which seats 500. Only a couple of years ago these tickets, along with the Met livestreams, would have been sold out. There is clearly a real fear of COVID affecting the older age groups who attend opera, and indeed Covent Garden and opera houses round the world have been suffering from poor attendance too. It could also be that like me people have become socialised to stay at home. Sitting in my comfortable armchair with my smart TV linked to my B&O HiFi, a glass of wine at my side and no mask, I can watch the finest operas from all round the world. Why bother going to London and to Covent Garden? But tonight was only being livestreamed to cinemas, the Cameo is a 10-minute walk from home, and at £17 it’s exactly the same price as my upper slips seat at Covent Garden! Of course it isn’t as good as being in the opera house but it is more comfortable and more accessible and I suspect the trend which was happening before COVID of viewing opera at home or in the cinema has been accelerated by the pandemic.
Well back to the opera: the sets were great; the Covent Garden orchestra under Russian conductor Oksana Lyniv sounded superb; Elena Stikhina was an excellent Floria Tosca in both singing and acting; the Scarpia of Alexey Markov was perhaps a little light in voice to convey the evil of Scarpia but he did have a nice tone. Other minor parts were well sung, and even with two intervals (sadly you can’t fast forward live streams!), the evening went quickly.
Above all Freddie De Tommaso looked and sounded the part. I still remember the young Pavarotti singing Lucia with Joan Sutherland back in the 1960s, and while Freddie doesn’t yet have the generous frame of Pavarotti, there is a resemblance: he is a big man with a big voice, and very handsome too. From his first notes his voice thrilled, he has a wide range and a lovely Italianate tone (something Charles Craig had too) sounding like the young Pavarotti. He got a storming reception for his first aria ‘Recondita Armonia’ and his later ‘E Lucevan le Stelle’ and his ‘O Dolci Mani’ were indeed very sweet. Freddie got great applause from the Covent Garden audience at the curtain and Oliver Mears the director of Covent Garden in an interview at the interval said they intended to make him a big star. He is singing Pinkerton in ‘Butterly’ next year. Freddie only graduated from the Royal Academy in 2018 but has since then won major prizes and sung all over Europe and been signed up by Decca for his first record ‘Passione’. Of course our own Brian Bannatyne~Scott interviewed Freddie last May, when he spotted the promise of this fine young singer. You can still read this interview in the ‘Edinburgh Music Review’ (we have a search facility now!) Be very grateful we now have a British tenor who can compare with the best in the world. Let’s hope he doesn’t oversing and burn out too soon.
