Giacomo Puccini: Tosca

“Explosive Chemistry” from London on DVD TOSCA with Angela Gheorghiu, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel.

When Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera House in London, raised the baton on 14 July 2011 to conduct Puccini’s “Tosca”, the audience knew that a very special evening was imminent. Three superstars appeared together on stage for the first time and played the leading roles in the famous musical drama: Angela Gheorghiu in the title role, Jonas Kaufmann as Cavaradossi and Bryn Terfel as Scarpia. In November 2011, the event of the London opera season went through the multiplex cinemas as a recording. Now this “Tosca” appearsas a DVD. “Three powerful elements create an explosive chemistry,” wrote The Times, coinage on the three main characters whose emotional network of love, hate, passion and jealousy drives the drama Tosca against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Angela Gheorghiu moved vocally and representatively in a cosmos of nuances of expression: she “expressed Tosca’s vulnerability with silvery lyricism, but then switched to the guttural-animalic as she stood over Scarpia’s corpse,” the Times continued. There is no doubt: This Tosca is a Tosca of our time, which is also expressed in Jonathan Kent’s highly dramatic staging and the opulent stage design of stage designer Paul Brown.