After a summer of institutional mishaps to raise the pulse of the most hardened spin doctor, the Royal Ballet and Opera’s new season was audible far beyond the venue. “Shame on you,” chanted protesters over a powerful PA system outside. Some, standing amid yellow and blue flags, simply held placards. “Art is not neutral,” read one. And indeed it isn’t, though opera’s entanglements in international geopolitics are rarely as visible as at Covent Garden in recent months. “It feels like crossing a picket line,” a colleague muttered grimly.
But modern opera houses are well soundproofed. By the first interval of Oliver Mears’ new production of Puccini’s Tosca with Russian soprano Anna Netrebko in the title role, the protesters had dispersed. Controversial as Netrebko’s casting has proved, the only disturbances inside the auditorium were roars of approval at the end of the opera’s best-loved numbers.
As the first collaboration between Mears – the organisation’s director of opera – and its new music director Jakub Hrůša, as well as RBO’s first new production of Tosca in almost 20 years, this was always going to be a high-stakes season opening. The house lights were dimmed only a fraction of a second before Hrůša landed Puccini’s opening orchestral chords, gleaming and bottom-heavy. The curtain rises on a monumental chapel interior: walls of white marble, a heap of rubble and broken pews on one side, Cavaradossi’s painting-in-progress on the other. There is more marble in Scarpia’s palace (forbiddingly cavernous, dominated by a vast wall clock) while the white tiling of Act 3’s torture-chamber-with-a-view is stained from punishments past.
Mears’ Rome is a 20th-century war zone. The chapel’s sacristan clears rubbish into a plastic bin bag; Cavaradossi is part of a restoration effort. The police chief Scarpia is an oleaginous CEO (1970s double-breasted suit, combover and a constant, fidgeting need to wipe his hands) with late-20th-century surveillance equipment and a team of thugs. Tosca the diva provides a flash of glamour amid so much drab. The only other colour pop is the blood splattered across Acts 2 and 3.
These are striking, harshly drawn tableaux. Freddie de Tommaso’s Cavaradossi arrived with all guns blazing and maintained a steady flow of vocal power throughout. Anna Netrebko’s Tosca – her covered soprano now hard and occasionally reedy – could compete with his wattage, but was at her most compelling in extremis, distraught as she negotiated with Scarpia. As the latter, Gerald Finley provided something altogether subtler and more insidious, his voice terrifyingly appealing, his bullying presence horribly believable. Holding it all together from the pit, Hrůša drove forwards and pulled back with absolute musical confidence, making space for moments of beauty but mining from the darkest, grittiest passages of Puccini’s score a performance of tremendous emotional force.
• At the Royal Opera House, London, until 7 October.
