The Choir and the Children's Choir of the National Opera The shocking Tosca by Giacomo Puccini under the musical direction of Loukas Karytinos and the direction-sets-costumes of Nikos S. Petropoulos is coming on January 26th for six unique performances at Ethros Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, in the context of the ELS tribute to Stefanos Lazaridis. This production was first presented in 2007, at the invitation of the then artistic director of ELS Stefanos Lazaridis, Nikos S. Petropoulos, who transferred the action of the project during the Second World War in Rome. The show emphasizes the element of violence and sadism, while allowing extreme emotions to be expressed with even greater intensity. In the Second Act of the opera, the blackmail of the protagonist by the lustful officer Scarpia and the scene in which Tosca kills him, acquire the dimensions of a thriller. The black and white aesthetics of the production and the evocative lighting give the spectacle the air of a cinematic film and in particular refer to the films of Italian neorealism. Stefanos Lazaridis noted about the production: "The shift of the historical context does not affect the main theme of the opera, which concerns the feelings and desires of the three main characters. But it aspires to bring to mind images much more familiar to all of us, from conditions that the older ones have lived and the younger ones have heard from stories and seen through documentaries and cinema. "Marginal conditions, which are the basis for the conflicts that Puccini's opera deals with." The director Nikos S. Petropoulos reports: In February 1944, in a Rome parody of a fortified city, full of refugees, spies, double agents, informants, German collaborators, dossiers, torturers, fugitives, in the midst of allied bombardment, of German troops and in the general panic, Tosca finds an ideal web to lead us to a realistic historical drama of the 20th century. The plot of the play is as follows: Floria Toska, an opera diva, is a woman madly in love, who is pathologically jealous of her partner. Baron Scarpia, a dark man with absolute power, delights in the pain of his victims. Between the two is the lover and pure patriot Mario Cavaradossi who is driven to death, not for his ideas, but because he owns Tosca, which Scarpia craves. The engine is well set up: no one will escape Scarpia's traps.,
