Tosca: round two

The new year of the Lyric Opera of Chicago started with a revival of the production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca that opened the season last fall. A partially different cast of singers and a different conductor took part in Franco Zeffirelli’s overindulgently lush visual frame, designed by Renzo Mongiardino, which Mundoclasico has already reviewed [see].Lyric Opera music director Andrew Davis, who had conducted the performances at the beginning of the season, left the podium to Stephen Lord. Compared to Davis’s interpretation, Lord showed less care for musical details, but his vision featured a more straightforward narrative, and provided Puccini’s music with a sense of grandiosity that better matches Zeffirelli’s visual conception than Davis’s more sober approach to the composer’s orchestral textures. Under Lord’s baton, what got lost in…