Classical music | Preview

Tosca is an opera in which almost nobody tells the truth and nearly everyone pays for it. Puccini packs political intimidation, sexual coercion, murder and betrayal into three taut acts. Take away the sets and costumes, and the music must carry the story’s mounting dread.

On November 13 and 15, Gustavo Dudamel leads the New York Philharmonic in concert performances of Tosca at Carnegie Hall. Marina Rebeka sings the title role, with Ludovic Tézier among the announced soloists. The setting changes the terms of attention. Instead of watching Rome’s churches and prison walls materialize onstage, an audience can observe the orchestra constructing the drama in plain sight.

Puccini’s orchestration does not merely accompany the singers. Bells establish the city; a few threatening phrases can make the police chief Scarpia seem present before he has spoken. Love and danger are rarely far apart in the score. The concert format exposes the mechanics of those transformations, even as it asks listeners to supply some of the visual world themselves.

The occasion also draws attention to Dudamel’s relationship with the Philharmonic. A conductor celebrated for extroverted orchestral color encounters a score that rewards intensity but punishes self-indulgence. Tosca moves too quickly to accommodate much grandstanding. Even its famous arias are moments of stillness borrowed from an almost merciless plot.

Carnegie Hall lends the performances a useful sense of occasion. Its stage has room for orchestral spectacle, but concert opera can be peculiarly intimate: singers standing with little theatrical protection, giving voice to characters whose choices have already begun to close around them.

Performances: November 13 at 7:30 p.m. and November 15 at 2 p.m., Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall calendar.

Carnegie Hall. Photograph: Epicgenius / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.