OPERA IN THE DESERT: SCOTTO IN ‘TOSCA’

Celebrating its eleventh season, the Palm Springs Opera Guild of the Desert scheduled three major events for its winter-spring season: an opera ball in January; a “Ballo in Maschera” in March, and, Monday night, “Tosca,” with none less than Renata Scotto in the title role.

Built around the veteran Italian soprano--Scotto was engaged first, her singing colleagues chosen second, the production created last--this mounting of Puccini’s melodrama is the handiwork of Riverside Opera, and will be given during the 1987-88 home season of that resuscitated organization. Without Scotto, of course--what Palm Springs can afford is usually beyond the reach of its neighbors.

What Palm Springs got, this week in its comfortable, 1,100-seat, high-school auditorium, was an ultraconventional production in dark colors and heavy textures, a variable but decently sung approximation of Puccini’s score and a chance to congratulate itself on making the venture work.

It is a truism that, when one produces opera in the provinces, what one is likely to come up with is provincial opera. In the performance given here Monday, the contribution of the choruses--both young people and adults--the impersonations by some of the secondary singers and the motley ange of the costumes betrayed low professional standards.

Yet what one saw and heard proved, as a package, sometimes respectable.

Scotto’s singing, as has often been noted during the 1980s, now occupies an artistic niche below her eventual place in history. The difference between the vocalism of the 52-year old soprano and her singing of a decade ago is consistency. Scotto’s command of musical line and steady tone has deteriorated.

At the same time, she still indulges in colorful word-painting, wild contrasts in dynamics, sudden shifts in vocal gears and other effects which spotlight the singer rather than the operatic character. The result, here as elsewhere, is a self-conscious exercise in operatic grandstanding.

Tosca’s femininity and vulnerability--they are two different things--her reality, are thus never created, only indicated, and by the most superficial means. This was a no-handkerchief affair.

Even so, Scotto, who looked ravishing in the most uncomplicated sense of that word, produced moments of compelling intensity, moments informed by still-handsome, if inconsistent, vocalism. Full-voice passages alternated with extended moments of nearly inaudible singing. Much of the mid-voice seems shot with holes; most--though not all--high notes emerged shrieked, more an act of will than a musical impulse.

And there were surprises, as when Scotto intoned, that is, actually sang, “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma,” a phrase that five generations of Toscas have spoken.

More straightforward, her Cavaradossi, the Russian defector formerly of the Minsk Opera, tenor Vyacheslav Polosov delivered an attractive stream of Italianate sound, looked heroic in a figure-revealing costume, and acted with fervor, which is not in his case the same as conviction. With Polosov’s sound and appearance, however, opera-lovers may not quibble.

Also effective, and often as roundly vocalized, was the globular Scarpia of Andrew Smith, an American from Kentucky whose credits include engagements at both Lincoln Center opera companies. Smith sang with admirable resonance but only intermittent appreciation of textual values; this is a Scarpia of generalized rather than specific villainy. Visually, he is ungainly; dramatically, primitive.

The remainder of the cast did its jobs with healthy-sounding voices but mixed and sometimes stylistically jumbled stage deportment. In the pit, James Sullivan, leader of Riverside Opera, conducted sympathetically and with strong appreciation of musical propulsion; his orchestra, which overflowed the little pit, only sometimes overwhelmed the singers.

Marc Langlois’ turn-of-the-century sets--here and there contradicted by anachronistic touches--served their purposes well.