Art may be inherently political, but when the politics of an arts organisation become the headlines, then you’ve got a problem. And The Royal Opera House has had a few of those recently: a pro-Palestine cast member hijacking a curtain call during a recent Trovatore revival, only to be (unsuccessfully) wrestled for his flag by artistic director Oliver Mears; the cancellation of plans to lend a production to Tel Aviv following internal dissent; persistent street protests all week following the return of Russian soprano Anna Netrebko for the first time in six years.
Nicknamed “Putin’s Diva”, Netrebko has been exiled by many international houses for her refusal to criticise the Russian President directly, and has recently responded by taking the Metropolitan Opera to court for discrimination.
So if all eyes were on this season’s opening night it wasn’t necessarily because the Royal Opera was premiering its first new staging of Tosca for almost 20 years, nor even that it marked the official debut of the company’s new music director Jakub Hrusa, stepping into Antonio Pappano’s exceedingly shiny shoes.
How to get out from under the headlines? Hrusa understood the assignment. House lights plunged to black without warning as those first thuggish chords landed their blows – no polite applause or preamble here, just a sucker-punch of sound from an orchestra that sounded like it had spent the summer in the gym: brass buffed, strings bulked, a gleaming beast of a band.
Where Jonathan Kent’s classic staging favoured antique verisimilitude, Oliver Mears and designer Simon Lima Holdsworth have gone sleek 20th-century shock-and-awe (Photo: Marc Brenner)Tosca is a big banker for the company, and Jonathan Kent’s classic staging managed to hold onto the crowds – and the revolving door of international divas – since its 2006 premiere. No pressure, then, on Mears to deliver its successor. And deliver he mostly does, in a production that ticks all the boxes without really doing much more.
Where Kent favoured antique verisimilitude, Mears and designer Simon Lima Holdsworth have gone sleek 20th-century shock-and-awe. There’s marble by the quarry-load, plenty of mid-century styling and nods to Fellini, roughed up by just enough Pasolini: a wipe-clean execution suite for Act III and a properly nasty death for Scarpia. Act I’s ruined church – tree branches bursting in through the dome, rubble piled high even before a bombing raid adds auxiliary percussion to the Te Deum – is a handsome highlight, though which conflict these camo-clad soldiers and their families are sheltering from is anyone’s guess.
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Mears needed star-power to launch his staging, and in Netrebko and perhaps even more so in young British-Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso, he got it. Netrebko’s soprano has long since darkened past a classic Tosca, cavernous and charred at the bottom, often wild in the middle. But the power, the occasional beauty, the sheer animal energy of her performance holds a stage. She’s vulgar, overdone and utterly committed: Tosca to the life.
There’s plenty of heat with De Tommaso who, if he sometimes pushes harder than is necessary, has bags of style to dress up his handsome, oaky tenor. Royal Opera regular Gerald Finley fills out Puccini’s love-hate-triangle as a greasy bureaucrat of a Scarpia: a subtle, understated performance that belongs in another cast.
Mears and Hrusa’s artistic mission was to bring the shock-factor back to Tosca; their commercial mission was to deliver something solid, revivable. This staging succeeds on both counts, even if it’s not likely to make headlines.
‘Tosca’ is at the Royal Opera House until 7 September
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