Puccini: Tosca – review

Karita Mattila has announced she is dropping Tosca from her repertoire, so those who were hoping to hear her in the role in London next year will have to make do with this performance from the New York Met, filmed during the opening run of Luc Bondy's controversial 2009 production. There's evidence – forced chest tones, unsteadiness when singing softly, lunges at high notes – that Mattila's move into dramatic soprano territory was a mistake from which she is wisely trying to extricate herself. But her extraordinary sense of theatre makes her compelling to watch, whether she's sexually teasing Marcelo Álvarez's fervent Cavaradossi in church, or attacking George Gagnidze's perverted Scarpia with a violence that borders on the pathological. Bondy keeps Puccini's specified period (1800), but also views the work as prophetic of 20th and 21st-century political violence. His staging has been criticised as overly austere, so it seems ironic that some of his quirkier glosses – Scarpia cavorting with prostitutes in the second act – come over as cluttered on DVD.