Sarasota Opera's Tosca relies on history for nuance, incorporating touches from early recordings of Puccini's fiery work.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 5, 2004
Victor DeRenzi and Tosca go back a long way together. "It was one of the first operas that I got to know as a kid. I first conducted Tosca 35 years ago," said DeRenzi, artistic director of Sarasota Opera. He returns to Puccini's thriller-diller this weekend to open the season.
Set in Rome during the Napoleonic wars, Tosca tells the tale of the title character, a famous opera singer played by Julie Makerov in Sarasota, her lover, the painter Cavaradossi (Todd Geer), and the chief of police, Scarpia (Todd Thomas).
Any production of Tosca comes with the weight of history and tradition behind it in terms of countless legendary performances and recordings. What can DeRenzi and his company bring to the hallowed work?
"I think a lot of that history and tradition in Tosca is lost, and I try to bring back the history," he said. "A lot of what Tosca is about is not in the score; it's in the interpretation of the score. If anything, I think I do an old-fashioned Tosca; in its interpretation values, it's closer to the 1920s than the 2000s."
As an example of a traditional approach to singing in Tosca that has been lost, DeRenzi cites a second-act scene by Scarpia.
"There's a line which is written fairly straightforward," he said. "But the performance practice is that he starts soft and then makes a big crescendo. That is something that all the old baritones did and is not done much anymore. I believe in those because Puccini was involved with many productions of his operas, so they developed and changed over the years even though the scores didn't. These were things that he not only allowed but encouraged and changed himself."
To learn such performance practices, DeRenzi is a student of historic recordings. For Tosca, his listening stops around 1965.
"By that point it had become more hearsay than actual performance practice, whereas there are recordings from the '20s and '30s where you had people singing who actually knew Puccini well," he said, citing a 1938 monaural recording with Maria Caniglia and Benaimino Gigli.
Tosca was especially well-served on disc in the 1950s. A 1953 performance with Maria Callas on EMI is considered one of greatest of all operatic recordings. DeRenzi thinks the Callas recording deserves its fame, but he also admires one with Renata Tebaldi from the same period.
"Callas was a great singer, but she lived in an age with many great singers, and I think people who love her tend to forget that. They tend to not acknowledge that she was a great singer but not the only great singer," he said.
Sarasota Opera has made a mark with its ongoing survey of all of Verdi's operas and its production of rarely performed works. This season, the Verdi and the rarity are one and the same, Il Corsaro, which opens March 6. The company's other productions are Mozart's Magic Flute (opening Feb. 14) and Massenet's Werther (Feb. 28).
DeRenzi said Corsaro is among the three most infrequently performed Verdi operas, along with Oberto and Alzira, both done by Sarasota. "It's probably the best of those three," he said. "It was written in 1848, so it's Verdi after Macbeth and right before Luisa Miller, Stiffelio, Rigoletto, Traviata. It certainly has never been done by any of the najor opera houses in this country. San Diego did it in the 1980s and that may be it."
Corsaro, with seven performances, is close to sold out already. Such support is the envy of other opera companies that can't attract an audience for anything but favorites like La Boheme or Carmen.
"I think our audience has learned that they will see a good performance," DeRenzi said. "Certainly much of our audience has seen Alzira, they've seen Oberto, they've seen the first version of Macbeth, so I think they've grown to look forward to this."
Another draw is the Sarasota Opera House, a 1920s-era theater that seats about 1,000. Though the cramped stage can sometimes be a limitation, the designers have learned to work with it, and hearing singing in such a cozy space is a big plus. The major American opera houses tend to be gigantic.
"I think the advantage to our theater is that you feel like you are part of the production because you're so close," DeRenzi said. "People forget that most of these operas were written for stages that are closer to the size of our stage than to the Metropolitan Opera stage or Chicago or San Francisco."
PREVIEW: Puccini's Tosca opens Saturday at Sarasota Opera and runs through March 27. $17-$96. Toll-free 1-888-673-7212 or (941) 366-8450.
