ELLEN Kent’s opera and ballet production company returns for its sacred spring season to the concert hall on Wednesday 20 with a Puccini masterpiece. In a fresh take on this Italian fest of intrigue, bartering, love, life and death, Kent takes her inspiration from the composer’s own house in Italy, a living museum to his genius:
“It was quite magical. I didn’t think it would be quite so inspiring. It was almost eerie – exactly as you would imagine Puccini to have created, with beautiful memorabilia everywhere. There were his shoes and clothes and pipes and all the models of his operas and his actual scores with all his notes on them.”
A veteran of big-number vehicles that bring the greats around Europe twice yearly, this English producer has bumped the tragic genre of Tosca up to the Gothic Victorian era for added depth.
“Puccini’s Tosca is an epic tale of true love and treachery featuring torture, murder and suicide alongside some of opera’s best-known music.
“Based on a play by Victorien Sardou, it was once described as a ‘shabby little shocker’. It tells of Floria Tosca’s true love for artist Mario Cavaradossi.
“Tosca is forced to enter into a deal with the Chief of Police Baron Scarpia in order to save Cavaradossi, her lover, from execution. Scarpia’s price is Tosca’s seduction, but she cannot go through with it, and in desperation she stabs Scarpia to death.
“Cavaradossi is executed and, realising all is lost, Tosca throws herself from the battlements to her dramatic death”.
Starring Vladimir Dragos as Scarpia with sopranos Maria Tonina and Alyona Kistenyova as Tosca, in a cast subject to change in this lengthy tour. Book at www.uch.ie
