Puccini - Tosca, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 28 2026

Conductor: Jordan de Souza. Production & costumes: Rafael R. Villalobos. Sets: Emanuele Sinisi. Lighting: Felipe Ramos. Paintings: Santiago Ydáñez. Floria Tosca: Leah Hawkins. Mario Cavaradossi: Stefano La Colla. Il barone Scarpia: Lucio Gallo. Cesare Angelotti: Li Huanhong. Il sagrestano: Paolo Orecchia. Spoletta: Trystan Llŷr Griffiths. Sciarrone: Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri. Un pastore: Pieter De Praetere. Un carceriere: René Laryea. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: Pieter Claes, Karl Forster

My last opera of the 25-26 season - assuming Rossini’s Le siège de Corinthe in Pesaro this coming August doesn’t count - was Rafael R. Villalobos’s production of Tosca, in Brussels. This isn’t new at La Monnaie, but when it first appeared there in 2021 it was - like this season’s Norma as well - severely hit by Covid restrictions, and so attended by only a few. I’d previously only seen the director’s Hänsel und Gretel, or in this case Jancsi és Juliska, performed in Hungarian in Budapest. That was nearly ten years ago. But as he is, unusually, a director I’ve actually met (you can count on the fingers of one hand the opera professionals I know personally), I’ve followed his career with interest since. So while, after seeing it, I remarked that his cheerful updating of the Humperdinck was only sparsely contested at the Erkel Theatre, I’m aware that in Barcelona, for example (this is a coproduction with Montpellier, Barcelona and Seville) his Tosca gave rise what one critic called a ‘monumental boo,’ of a kind ‘not heard there in twenty years.’

Why?

Well of course it could just have been that the audience had expected a more traditional Tosca, though by now, in Barcelona, that seems unlikely. Perhaps it was because Villalobos's take on the work is just too complicated, with a certain piling-on of ideas suggested to him by the story. To me, as staged, it doesn’t actually live up to the ambitions laid out on La Monnaie’s website and in the copious programme notes. (La Monnaie’s programmes are not just a flimsy leaflet full of adverts for jewellery and scent, but two sturdy volumes, one containing cast details, the plot, bilingual essays and photos, and another the complete libretto, in the original language plus French and Flemish.)

More specifically, though, as far as I know, what was most loudly booed at the Liceu was a scene acted out in silence, right after the interval, in a box beside the stage: a tiff of sorts between an actor looking like Pier Paolo Pasolini and a curly-haired youth - perhaps Pino Pelosi, his alleged assassin. Because yes, a Pasolini lookalike is present on stage, and the production refers, explicitly if (thank goodness) surprisingly tamely, to the director’s Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma. 

Villalobos ingeniously links Pasolini to all three of the opera’s main characters. ‘This great artist,’ he writes in one of the programme essays, ‘regarded as an enemy of the government, was persecuted by the very same institutions of power as those depicted in Victorien Sardou’s play.’ According to one of several quotations from Pasolini projected during the production, ‘The moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.’ So in the painter Mario, we see one facet of the cineast.

The title of his essay, Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, refers as much to Mario (though in a different sense) as to Scarpia. ‘In my view,’ the director tells us, ‘there is a close parallel between the sadomasochistic yet incredibly poetic world of Salò and the second act of Tosca.’ In Scarpia, we see a second facet of Pasolini. 

Then in Tosca herself, we see a third. The production, Villalobos tells us, deals with fear, faith and loss of faith - Tosca’s like Pasolini’s. ‘I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief,’ is another quotation projected during the production. The three acts are intended, the director tells us, to reflect Tosca’s progress from naive, unthinking belief in the first, through shock and incipient doubt in the second, to ‘the post-traumatic alienation’ of the third. For good measure, Romans 8 (Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified’) and Victor Hugo’s The Pope (‘Le sceptre est vain, le trône est noir, la pourpre est vile’) are also convoked.

There's one basic set. A modular central space on stage is formed, under a ring of neon, by two concentric, rotating half-rotundas, the outer one a series of solid white arches inspired by Italian fascist architecture, the inner one, repeating the arches, a white steel framework, a sort of pergola. As each is open to one side, as the one rotates around the other, they provide the necessary scene changes and entries and exits. Each act involves monumental paintings, specially commissioned from Andalucian artist Santiago Ydáñez: a giant Madonna, giant nudes filling the arches, replaced, as the set shifts, by snarling dogs, a Judith and Holofernes inspired by Caravaggio…

The first act’s staggering, long-haired Angelotti is on his last legs. To paint, Mario wears a white shirt and grey suit trousers, like no artist I’ve ever seen at work. Tosca enters in a trouser-suit and an absurdly broad-brimmed, floppy hat, all black, carrying multiple Chanel-style shopping bags. She is coquettish, but solemnly lays a bouquet of lilies at the feet of a chalk-white statue of the Virgin. The louche, occasionally vicious sacristan entertains an ambiguous relationship with his three choirboys, near-naked under semi-transparent shifts. During their horseplay, just as Scarpia appears buttoned up in narrow, undertaker black, one of them is stripped to his underpants.

In an interview online, Villalobos assures us the plot is played out straightforwardly, and largely it is. But at the end of the act there’s no procession, indeed no chorus on stage at all: they’re kept in the wings. And there’s no cardinal, either, but Tosca sails in at the rear (like, I thought incongruously, the Marschallin showing up at the inn) in a stiff white gown that obviously but mysteriously recalls a Pope - Scarpia, after all, is holding a mitre. While Pasolini hovers in the background, when she turns to leave, she reveals a skull painted on the back.

In the central act, equally unexpectedly, she enters in shoulder-caped, cardinal red robes, before shucking them off to remain in a simple, black dress. Scarpia washes her feet. This is the Salò act, so the choirboys, now naked and carrying lilies like the ones Tosca laid at the Virgin’s feet, are subject to the (simulated) sado-masochistic attentions of Scarpia’s handsome but loutish sbirri. And this is the act where, as Mario is tortured, the Pasolini-inspired standing nudes are replaced by those snarling hounds.

The act three set is at its barest. The rotundas effectively recall the circular castle, and bear the words ROMA O MORTE in white neon. The ‘post-traumatic alienation’ is expressed in Tosca’s exaggerated laughter and screams. At the end, as in some other contemporary productions, rather than leaping off the mausoleum, she walks off slowly into clouds of brightly-lit stage smoke.

I won't claim that all this directorial ‘apparatus’, so to speak, is mistaken or misguided, but unfortunately Villalobos doesn't make it work convincingly. In print, he presents his ideas with conviction, but the result on stage seems somehow half-hearted. In the end it had me wondering whether Tosca isn’t just obvious enough as it stands (Sardou was seen, so I’ve read, as a particularly efficient playwright), and as such, a dubious candidate for conceptualisation.

But then… we were just emerging from the hottest June heatwave Europe has ever experienced, and it was still, on Sunday, a warm afternoon. Who knows what it felt like, for the cast, to be costumed up under theatre lights on stage? Also, as I’ve often said about these Brussels matinees, not all singers are at their best just after lunch. This is why I hesitate to say how I felt about the singing. Here are my honest thoughts.

Paolo Orecchia was a firmer-sounding, less decrepit sagrestano than we often get. 

Stefano La Colla (Mario) is, as someone better-qualified than I am said to me later, no doubt a serviceable singer. He hits all the notes, mostly loudly - i.e. he’s the ‘can belto’ kind, not really cut out for loving tenderness. His lower and middle range has, to my ear, a slightly hollow sound, and his top thins out to a metallic cord. His way of sliding down from it, something he does more than once, with that steely sound and no vibrato, is ugly. He uses the irritating, showy trick of ending his hit numbers with a crescendo on the final note, and the young Canadian conductor, Jordan de Souza, made the mistake of giving him ‘concert’ endings, i.e. bringing the orchestra to a halt after them. Unfortunately, at the end of ‘Recondita armonia’, the audience remained silent.

Lucio Gallo (Scarpia) is a solid, dark baritone (bass, I might even have supposed), whose experience shows. He seems most comfortable at the top of his range; when agitated his intonation in the medium sounds unruly. He was, I thought, the best in this cast.

Leah Hawkins (Tosca) has a darkish, chesty lower range and a smoky, almost husky medium. Her voice isn’t wholly consistent - it alters as it rises, and her top notes are more those of a strong lyric soprano than a dramatic one. It felt as though she saved her best for ‘Vissi d’arte’, which I guess is understandable. She isn’t the first and won’t be the last. I’m not sure, though, she has quite the vocal heft, from bottom to top, for the role.

De Souza’s approach to the score was more brash and ‘in-your-face’ than varied and subtle, which is one way of approaching Tosca, though at times, that being said, he could at times still have injected more vigour and drive into it.

I’m afraid all this comes across as too bleakly negative. The cast were all reasonably strong and visibly committed, yet… this wasn’t really an international-class Tosca. Leaving the house, my neighbour and I concluded that, taken as a whole, whatever the singers’ merits, none of it had actually given us any pleasure. A disappointing conclusion to a Tosca, and in this case, to the season.

Note: some of the production photos, by Pieter Claes and Karl Forster, show a different cast.

Maestro Wenarto opts for a more traditional staging:

(An edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.)