Sam Furness joins soprano Mari Wyn Williams for West Green House Opera’s Tosca.
There is a particular kind of nerve required to walk into a rehearsal room and meet your leading lady for the very first time, knowing that within a fortnight the two of you must persuade an audience you would die for one another.
The leading lady in question is the Welsh soprano Mari Wyn Williams, who sings the title role in West Green House Opera’s new Tosca, with Furness opposite her as the painter Cavaradossi. That makes the doomed lovers at the heart of Puccini’s Roman thriller a pair of Welsh voices, a happy piece of casting for anyone who follows singing from this part of the world, even if the two of them had to travel to a garden in Hampshire to meet. They had never so much as crossed paths before that first morning of rehearsals, which lends a certain real-life charge to a partnership the score insists must generate the most dangerous heat in the repertoire. On the evidence of Furness’s enthusiasm, the introductions went well.
Cavaradossi is not quite new to him, though it is not yet an old friend either. “I’ve sung the role once in a shortened version at a festival in Finland,” he explains, “and once in English with Oxford Opera last year.” West Green, then, gives him his first Cavaradossi in the full Italian on a proper festival stage, a staging post rather than a starting line, but an important one all the same.
Sam Furness as Cavaradossi
It also takes him into territory he does not visit as often as one might expect. “It is somewhat new for me, as I don’t do that much Italian opera,” he admits, “but I love it.” The Puccini corner of his repertoire is filling up nicely regardless: he has sung Rodolfo in La bohème, Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi and Pang in Turandot, and would, he says with an audible grin, “love to do all of the others.” Cavaradossi is a natural next step for a lyric tenor testing how much heft the voice will carry, and one senses him relishing the stretch.
The role also comes freighted with memory. Ask most singers where their love of an opera began and you get a polite answer; ask Furness and you get a genuine one. “I saw it at the Bregenz Festival when I was about twenty, and it blew me away,” he recalls, Tosca staged on that vast floating lakeside stage being precisely the sort of spectacle to lodge in a young singer’s imagination for good. Earlier still, it was one of the first operas he ever encountered at all, on television, in the celebrated performance with Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu. “They were rather good at it, I must say,” he adds, with the dryness of a man who has since learned exactly how hard it is.
Mari Wyn Williams and Sam Furness
For this production he joins an entirely fresh set of colleagues. He has not worked at West Green before, nor with any of the creative team, which this year is led by the acclaimed Australian director Suzanne Chaundy, making her UK debut fresh from her triumph with Melbourne Opera’s complete Ring Cycle, with the excellent Alice Farnham in the pit. For a singer, arriving cold to a new house, a new director and a new stage partner all at once is either daunting or invigorating depending on temperament; Furness plainly belongs to the second camp.
If West Green audiences do not yet know his voice, that is more an accident of geography than of profile. Furness has built a long and happy association with Garsington Opera, where Tosca will be his eighth role for the company, having sung Lensky in Eugene Onegin, Flamand in Capriccio and, last summer, Chekalinsky in The Queen of Spades. That last was a family affair, staged by his younger brother, the director Jack Furness, the pair having first made music together as eight-year-old choristers at Llandaff Cathedral, then at Cambridge, and then through Shadwell Opera, the adventurous company Jack founded and in which Sam has sung since the very beginning. Add a Nero at the Grange Festival and, this spring, Lysander in Deborah Warner’s new Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Teatro Real in Madrid, and you have a tenor whose reticence on the Welsh stage looks stranger by the season.
As for where Cavaradossi might take him next, Furness is refreshingly unabashed about his ambitions. “I hope so,” he says of singing the role again elsewhere. “The Met would be good, though I would not turn La Scala down either.” It is said with a laugh, but a tenor who has just added one of Puccini’s great parts to his book is entitled to aim high, and there is no false modesty in a man who knows what the voice can do.
For now, though, the aim is closer to hand: two performances in the Green Theatre at West Green House, a soprano he had only just met, and one of the most gripping thrillers ever set to music.
Puccini’s Tosca — West Green House Opera
Saturday 25 July at 7pm and Sunday 26 July at 6pm, in the Green Theatre. Mari Wyn Williams (Tosca), Sam Furness (Cavaradossi), Jean-Kristof Bouton (Scarpia), Ross Ramgobin (Sacristan), Adam Sullivan (Spoletta), Ronald Nairne (Angelotti). Director Suzanne Chaundy; conductor Alice Farnham.
West Green House Gardens, Thackham’s Lane, near Hartley Wintney, Hook, Hampshire RG27 8JB — 45 minutes from London, between the M3 and M4 and close to Winchfield station. Box office 01252 848676.
Tickets and dining: westgreenhouseopera.co.uk
