Review: Opera Hong Kong’s Tosca a success but not without flaws
While two leads were technically proficient but lacked sufficient warmth, secondary singers did admirably and sets, orchestra and chorus were excellent
Despite its flaws, this collaboration between Opera Hong Kong and the Taormina Opera Festival can be counted a success. The music of Puccini, one of the last Romantic masters, worked its dramatic magic, and the opera flooded the senses with light, colour, sound and passion. The audience was immediately drawn into the drama with the glowing red doorways of the set, which had the depth and detail, including real candlelight, to stir the imagination.
This performance starred soprano Svetla Vassileva as Tosca and tenor Wei Song as Cavaradossi, and both delivered the high notes but were missing the warmth and pathos that make for supreme opera moments.
Song’s voice sounded more golden the higher he got. He was at his best in Vittoria! Vittoria! with some splendid sustained notes.
It’s hard to analyse what brings a lump in the throat in a great opera performance, but it happens with singers with such perfect control that they can relax and be swept up in the emotion. In the aria O dolci mani, the details of phrasing drew attention to themselves as mannerisms rather than as expression.
Vassileva is the embodiment of intensity, and the more furious she was, the better she sounded. Her high notes split the air and could have carried across Victoria Harbour. However, the tender moments were not as convincing, and the soft low notes at times had an uncomfortable throaty edge. In her lament at her fate, Vissi d’arte, the thread of sound rising from silence had hints of a truly delicate radiance, but with her wide vibrato, her timing that was a bit out of synch, and the squeezing out of the final notes, the applause was deservedly tepid.
