Listening to Puccini: Dan Ettinger’s Verismo Absolute

This evening, I was briefly disabused of the notion that I was in Tel Aviv. Beyond the doors of the Israeli Opera, it felt as though the Piazza della Scala lay waiting, and a Milanese night was about to fall—or perhaps a Roman one, given the setting of the most distinctly Roman opera ever written. It recalled an almost forgotten era: a time when men still courted women and, as a consequence, hatched schemes (and arranged executions) against their more fortunate rivals.

Such was tonight’s Tosca; the singing and playing were of a caliber that rendered La Scala quite unnecessary. The tenor, in particular, presented that rare occasion when one feels compelled to mentally recalibrate one's personal hierarchy of Cavaradossis—Pavarotti, Domingo, Bjoerling, Gigli... (I have not heard Kaufmann in the role, so pray forgive the omission).

“Our” tenor goes by the name of Eduardo Aladrén. The Spanish singer possesses that signature "teardrop" break in the voice on the verge of a sob—reminiscent of Franco Corelli—alongside a masterful use of pauses and catch-breaths that simulate genuine weeping, all paired with utterly effortless high notes. Paired with the sensational Elena Mikhailenko, he made me realize Puccini wrote far too few duets; after each one, I felt moved to demand at least one more from the composer.

                                  Photos by © Yossi Zwecker

Giacomo Puccini was, as is well known, guilty of an obsessive topographical and temporal pedantry, fusing Tosca irrevocably to the precise Roman locations of June 1800. It was all the more striking, then, how completely the score liberated itself from visual props and spatio-temporal constraints within the Israeli Opera house. When Maestro Dan Ettinger takes the podium, the visual plane can be painlessly discarded as superfluous. The conductor unfolds before us a self-contained, hermetic, and frighteningly perfect sonic cosmos, where every bar is dissected with the painstaking rigor of a structuralist and sung with the raw sensuality of a true verist. Yes, sung—for Ettinger voices every part alongside his singers.

One could wax lyrical at length about the cast: this was, quite simply, a vocal absolute. Elena Mikhailenko in the title role provided a benchmark dramatic soprano, capable of traversing a complex emotional spectrum from high-society caprice to existential dread. Her voice—dense, rich in timbre, and remarkably luminous—possesses remarkable projection. She commands a vibrant palette of vocal colors, shifting instantaneously from dark, almost mezzo-like lows to a searing, brilliant upper register (expressing both tenderness toward Cavaradossi and venom toward Scarpia; and not merely through her tone—Mikhailenko is an exceptional actress). Furthermore, her control of dynamic shading is virtuoso: her cantilena in the First Act duet, “Quale occhio al mondo,” wove an immaculate lacework of sound, displaying absolute intonational courage, while in the dramatic furnace of Act II (the interrogation and murder of Scarpia), she effortlessly sliced through Puccini’s dense orchestration. Her climactic “Vissi d’arte” carried a noble, unvarnished piety freed from melodramatic excess; Mikhailenko sustained the vocal line on a flawless legato—indeed, every breath served the overarching musical narrative. She rendered Tosca’s principal aria as an intimate prayer, her hands folded just as if Mario had finally managed to complete his dark-eyed Madonna.

                                     Photo by © Yossi Zwecker

As for the Spanish tenor Eduardo Aladrén, his voice continues to ring in my ears (a state of pure bliss, I assure you). His fiery, sun-drenched spinto timbre is entirely devoid of operatic saccharine. Moreover, Aladrén is a master of long-breathed phrasing. His celebrated “Recondita armonia” unfolded like an exquisite nocturne, while in the final Act III duet, “O dolci mani,” he attained an almost impossible sense of freedom. This duet, set by the composer in a radiant, mystical major key, became pure auditory metaphysics in the hands of Mikhailenko and Aladrén. Their voices merged into flawless unison, revealing an intonational alignment and a rare empathy that separate the true vocal elite from the rest. Intriguingly, Aladrén’s emotional anguish remains strictly contained within Puccini’s phrasing, never fracturing the vocal line; as a result, his Cavaradossis feels strikingly modern, cinematic, and psychologically nuanced.

Baron Scarpia, portrayed by the Polish baritone Mikołaj Zalaśinski, emerged as a refined intellectual of evil—Beria-esque spectacles playing no small part in this effect (from what recess of director Ido Ricklin’s genetic memory did those emerge? One can only wonder). Zalaśinski sang superbly, though to my ear his timbre is somewhat high for Scarpia; I am accustomed to hearing dramatic baritones in the role. Zalaśinski is by nature an ideal Verdi baritone—a brilliant Macbeth, Rigoletto, or Count di Luna, his voice tailored for a high tessitura. Scarpia presents a different proposition: Puccini scored the part for a more grounded, heavy, almost bass-baritone weight. Yet this made the interpretation all the more captivating: Zalaśinski’s noble, cantabile Verdian tone stripped Scarpia of the usual grime and coarse lower-register heaviness. Rather than a grim, lumbering brute, this villain became a pampered, depraved, and vocally elegant patrician. He does not raise his voice; he raises the degree of danger. The threat springs not from forte blasts, but from impeccably sculpted recitative—an intonation dripping with an almost aesthetic pleasure in the terror of others.

Crucially, even the secondary vocal geometry of the production was flawlessly constructed. Yuri Kissin endowed the Sacristan with precise bass colors and subtle musical eccentricity, steering entirely clear of caricature—even as the director’s sarcasm toward the devout was palpably felt. Anthony Webb’s Spoletta sounded sharp, sinister, and focused in timbre. Indeed, all the minor roles rose admirably to the occasion.

                                   Photos by © Yossi Zwecker

The orchestra under Dan Ettinger demonstrated that rare degree of executive autonomy wherein the music ceases to be mere illustration for the stage drama, becoming instead the primary demiurge of the action. The Maestro stripped Puccini’s score of tearful sentimentality. In its place stood an irreproachable architectonics, a graphic clarity of line, and a phenomenal, almost Baroque attention to textural detail. The orchestral fabric breathed, pulsated, and seemed endowed with an intelligence all its own. Ettinger never forces the sound; he masterfully controls dynamic strata, constructing the opera’s macrostructure upon the subtle gradations of piano and pianissimo. Consequently, the rare, tectonic verismo outbursts from the brass achieved a truly apocalyptic scale.

The supreme analytical delight of the evening lay in how acutely Ettinger dissected Puccini’s sophisticated system of leitmotifs, turning it into an unerring psychological trigger. Having adapted Wagner’s technique of thematic recall, Puccini compressed it here into a masterclass of verismo concision. The opera begins not with an overture, but with the calling card of evil itself: three thunderous, chromatically descending chords for Scarpia (B-flat – A-flat – E), delivered by the brass with chilling directness. This tritone—the diabolus in musica—does not merely frighten in Ettinger’s hands; it metastasizes throughout the entire score, reminding us of impending doom even during the most intimate passages. In contrast to this brutal opening, Tosca’s own leitmotif—an elegant, syncopated, feminine descending phrase—sounds in the orchestra like a fragile, doomed manifestation of vitality. Ettinger collides these themes within symphonic layers with virtuoso skill, exposing their inner kinship: at the fatal moment of the Baron’s murder in Act II, Scarpia’s motif paradoxically mutates, yielding to the tragic triumph of Floria’s theme, played on the agonizing edge of the strings.

As for the stage direction (and I do not mean the scenography, which was lovely; I have long admired the work of German designer Falko Herold), Ido Ricklin proves occasionally shocking. The director strains so desperately to stuff Puccini’s masterpiece with psychoanalytic riddles that he periodically wanders into the territory of comic strips. Consider the sequence featuring a zombie-Madonna and a skeleton dance preceding Act III, or the corpse of Angelotti in a tracksuit dangling from a noose against the backdrop of “E lucevan le stelle” (or rather, he was dragged from a sack and hoisted up, dangling through “Amaro sol per te m’era il morire”). Thus, while the orchestra prepared us for the tragic outcome, we were treated to digital graphics: the blue-eyed Mary Magdalene from Cavaradossis’s Act I painting came to life, her eyes turning a terrifying blank white, before shrinking down into a tacky starlet in a fur coat and mini-skirt. Meanwhile, the imprisoned Cavaradossi was transformed before the astonished audience into an anatomical skeleton, bursting into a jig with this newly minted pop diva. This animated danse macabre—which slid seamlessly into the vocal part of the Shepherd Boy (who was absent, replaced by the starlet)—left the house in some bewilderment. Yet the sheer vocal mastery of the soloists restored true tragic weight to the performance.

                                      Photo by © Yossi Zwecker

Insofar as I could decipher the director’s concept, Ricklin set out to transform Puccini’s opera into a treatise on systemic abuse. Here, Scarpia languishes among server racks; his henchmen lazily chew pizza between torture sessions; Mario films Floria on a smartphone; Spoletta fetishistically sniffs shoes; and the grand finale of Act I (the Te Deum) culminates in the heroine thrashing in gynaecological convulsions on the apron while prop blood trickles down a white screen. The audience reacted with mixed feelings: as ruby streams flowed across the backdrop and Tosca channeled Leah possessed by a dybbuk (from a previous Ricklin production), the stalls exchanged glances, cleared their throats, and sighed politely.

In Act II, evidently deciding that the canonical dagger was too bourgeois, the director handed our refined Roman prima donna… a broken bottle (or rather, she fished a "molly" out of a trash bin herself). Whereupon Floria Tosca sliced open the Baron’s carotid artery with the agility of a seasoned barroom brawl veteran.

Yet—what else did you expect?—beneath all this lies a dense metanarrative. Through Ricklin’s lens, the totalitarian space of Puccini’s Rome is reassembled as a Benthamite-Foucaultian digital panopticon. Baron Scarpia is no mere voluptuous nineteenth-century satrap, but a demiurge of the Big Data era, executing the desacralization of the human body through an interface of total surveillance. His office, reconceptualized as a server room, serves as the assembly point for a new digital reality in which violence is impersonal and intimacy is abolished entirely. The mobile phone with which Scarpia captures Tosca undressing becomes the primary instrument of dehumanization: tragedy is reduced to content, and Cavaradossi’s dying screams to an audio file awaiting archive. The director attempts to interrogate the mechanics of power that no longer require shackles, having seized control of optical channels of perception. So there you have it.

                                  Photo by © Yossi Zwecker

Oh, and one more thing: Tosca did not jump. Intrigued by this choice, I discovered that dispensing with Tosca’s famous leap from the parapet of Castel Sant'Angelo is currently one of the most ubiquitous—and contentious—clichés in contemporary European Regietheater. Directors increasingly deny Tosca her final flight, deeming the traditional leap onto a hidden mattress behind the scenery too naive. In Ricklin’s staging, her outstretched arms at the roof’s edge—a metaphor for freezing before the abyss—presumably signify that Tosca "dies internally." She has no need to physicalize the jump; her world is already obliterated. Given that Floria resembles Leah in the Act I finale, this outstretched gesture may also symbolize a final trance—the heroine's retreat into an alternate, fractured reality where the physical death of the body no longer matters.

Be that as it may, the Israeli Opera proved tonight that when the verismo truth of Puccini’s music is anchored by phenomenal directorial will from the podium and vocal culture of the highest order, any external concept becomes mere background noise to the absolute triumph of sound.

Tel Aviv, The Israeli Opera, July 19, 2026