“Tosca” at Covent Garden; the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at the Albert Hall

So the new Royal Opera season opened on Thursday: a new season with the new music director (Jakub Hrůša) conducting a new production (Puccini’s “Tosca”), starring a renowned Russian diva (Anna Netrebko) making her politically controversial return to the opera house after six years’ absence. In the event, protests against Netrebko’s appearance were confined to a loud but small and orderly demonstration outside the front of the Covent Garden opera house - while the most clear triumph indoors belonged to Netrebko.

Netrebko, though versatile, has misfired in several roles (in my experience, the title roles of Lucia di Lammermmoor, Manon, and Manon Lescaut). She performs with exceptional impulsiveness: which, at best, makes her compellingly spontaneous. At worst, however, her singing is simply blowsy. 

As Tosca, a role that has been in her repertory for years, she was exemplary on Thursday, bringing freshness to every line, touches of quiet inwardness where I have never heard them before (“Assassino!”), using the undiminished glamour of her voice and her physicality to marvelous effect. Her chest register is fabulously firm, her top notes lustrous, but the greatest marvels are the expressive way she sustains certain long notes, drawing the house into her thought, while we marvel af the sheer glowing beauty of this voice, which seems to resonate from every part of her body. (As often in the past, some of her tones under pressure have a pronounced intrusive vibrato, but it’s never squally.) Her acting is utterly focused: in the first scene, her prima-donna absurdities and over-reactions are endearingly funny, but every scene that follows reveals new facets of Tosca as woman in love - jealous, heroic, suspicious, mettlesome - and of Tosca as a dismayed potential rape victim.

I’m afraid that I have always found “Vissi d’arte” the most tedious aria in the repertory - the big melody goes to the violins rather than to the soprano, while the soprano’s words are a ludicrous example of passive aggression addressed to God (since I’ve been good, why on on earth are you repaying me this way?). Yet Netrebko did marvels with it, especially with the most prolonged notes, which here had exceptional beauty even while they also expressed Tosca’s anguish: never did they seem mere feats of duration.

In a largely ugly modern-dress production, costume designer Ilona Karas saved the only two marvellous dresses for Netrebko, a raspberry-red just-beneath-the-knee number for Act One and a flowing emerald diva gown for Act Two. Netrebko’s physicality is always riveting: too bad that Oliver Mears, directing, gave her some acting-into-the-walls (an operatic cliché that people were parodying over twenty years ago), but she delivered it all persuasively; and, in the Act Three narration of murdering Scarpia, she made more sense of the top C than I have ever known, holding her hands together above her head as she mimed holding the fatal knife. Netrebko, whom I have seen in fourteen roles, is a variable artist, but this performance showed just why she can be one of the most thrilling performers in opera today. 

Hrůša, conducting, showed an easy command of “Tosca”’s idiom. (Charles Mackerras used to audition conductors with the start of Act One: tricky stuff.) Still, I have a cavil. Puccini made this a largely through-composed score, with very few clearcut breaks for applause. Hrůša, however, paused several times as if to cue applause: surely a stylistically retrograde step. Let’s hope that, now that this production has begun life, he now presents its music as a more unified sweep. 

It’s good to have, in Freddie De Tommaso, a British tenor who sounds entirely Italian and who, with virile force, commands top, middle, and bottom of his range. Still, I wish he did not sing almost everything so loudly - loudly even in church, loudly even when addressing an escaped political prisoner, loudly even when embracing the woman he loves, loudly even when in private reflection. Sure, in Act Three, he sang parts of “E lucevan le stelle” softly, but only, it seemed, because that’s where every other tenor sings quietly too.

Gerald Finley plays Scarpia as a seedy bespectacled creep. His lounging, guzzling body language is - excitingly - the diametric opposite of the aristocratic hauteur with which Tito Gobbi played the role. I’d applaud Finley as one of the great singing actors of our day (he has often been that), but his diction was so backwardly placed on Thursday that his Italian words never bit home as they should. 

Oliver Mears has been director of opera at Covent Garden for (exactly) nine years: why? In Handel’s “Jeptha” and “Semele”, he directed the kind of postmodern wiseguy productions that spelt out how the characters sang one thing but did and/or meant the opposite. His treatment of the new “Tosca” is more straightforward, apart from its modern timeframe. (Scarpia watches TV, though why the chief of police works without any computer is a mystery.) But the entrances and exits of Act One looked far more artificially clunky than in Covent Garden’s last two productions. Separate groups of characters all suddenly arrive on cue into geometrically neat choreographed positions. 

Whereas previous house productions made Rome look believably attractive, this one manages to look both unconvincing and unappealing. The Act One church, recently bombed, is laden with rubble - to which no character onstage ever refers in his or her behaviour. In Act Three, Angelotti is shot dead by the police onstage, with a shower of bloodstains, some of which a staff cleaner takes ages to mop up without ever wiping an unmissable display of blood from the wall. Thanks to such flaws, “Tosca” becomes a more artificial drama than when it was set in Napoleon’s day.

Earlier in the week, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra gave two Albert Hall Prom concerts under maestro Frans Welser-Möst. I confess that I had never heard this most legendary of orchestras in live performance; but I’m happy to say that the Vienna Philharmonic sound is even more superb than I had anticipated. The lower strings, as I had hoped, played with gleaming purposefulness; the violins were like Netrebko’s voice, dark and light at the same time. The horns were singing horns, wonderful in legato lines. And the wind players combine with brilliant ease, finishing one another’s phrases with seamless naturalness. Coördination was miraculous throughout. 

In Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, and in three movements from Berg’s “Lulu” Suite, all this was thrilling. To those of us who only seldom listen to Bruckner, this Ninth was a wake-up call: powerful, galvanising, fascinating. But what does it tell us that in the scores I knew better, I found Welser-Möst’s conducting far less remarkable? In Mozart’s “Prague” symphony, matters were just too polite and without brilliance; Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony became too classically contained, guarded, elegantly measured. Brisk pizzicati had been electrifying in the Bruckner, but isolated pizzicati that have often felt stabbing or explosive in the “Pathétique” were here just more of the same. I long to hear this Rolls-Royce of orchestras again, but with other maestri. 

@Alastair Macaulay 2020