Tosca, Welsh National Opera review - a great company reduced to brilliance

So it’s come to this: WNO’s autumn season reduced to two operas, a Tosca borrowed from Opera North and a revival of their own Candide from two years back; then two next spring. a revival of their Valleys saga Blaze of Glory (about mine closures and singers who won’t give up) and a new Flying Dutchman.

And – wait for it – Tosca is with a reduced orchestra, not because some bright spark has decided to freshen it up, modernise it, but for a simpler, more compelling reason: there is no money.

What can a great company placed in this position by idiot, philistine apparatchiks do? Well, what they can do is stage the most brilliant performance of Puccini’s warhorse that I have seen, and I’ve seen a few, including at least four in Wales. Edward Dick’s Leeds production was reviewed here by Graham Rickson when it was new in 2018, so I will be brief on the conceptual aspect. I’m cooler than Graham about the Pantheon-like dome that dominates every scene (can’t see the point), and about the double bed in Scarpia’s apartment (unnecessary vulgarity). The laptops and mobile phones, in a production only qualifiedly updated, are a modish irritant, nothing worse.

But what make this revival special are the basics: the singing, the acting and the stage direction, all of which would make their impact on an empty stage. We unfortunately missed the first few minutes of Act 1, having spent the previous 40 minutes in a traffic jam half a mile from the theatre in pouring rain. But from the moment we crept into the stalls it was evident that something exceptional was taking place. The scene between Tosca (Natalya Romaniw) and Cavaradossi (Andrés Presno) was lively and vivid, helped, oddly enough, by an orchestral sound made more airy by the reduced strings (pictured right). When Scarpia (Dario Solari) appeared, the violent darkening was all the more powerful, the Te Deum with the children doubly sinister.

The second act is riveting from start to finish with not a weak moment. Romaniw is not only a superbly focused dramatic soprano, she is a natural actress, a fine, expressive mover, supremely watchable in everything she does. No need here to suspend disbelief in Cavaradossi’s passion or Scarpia’s lust. And the voice conveys her vulnerability as well as her charm (and one has always to remember that she is playing a singer, so the voice is part of the role as well as the medium for its transmission). “Vissi d’arte”, lying on the floor, is finely controlled, and though Sunday’s audience had highly participatory elements, the conductor Gergely Madaras mercifully left no room for the inevitable, indiscriminate applause (“they even clap,” said Schnabel, “when it’s good”).

What makes this act ultimately so gripping is, of course, the company, the comings and goings, the complicated interactions with the unseen but heard torture chamber, all admirably coordinated by Madaras and the stage directors. Here Solari’s presence and vocal authority are central. He has no truck with sympathy (none is possible), but the double edge to his character is made real, and it’s his vulnerability, his susceptibility to beauty, that does for him. The act is at its heart a duet, and this performance, more than any I’ve seen, proved the genius of Puccini as a musical dramatist, whatever anyone may say about its crude or sadistic mechanisms.

Presno, in his element in the final act here, is a stylish performer and likewise a strong actor, transiting well from the semi-respectable artist of the first act to the tortured, dishevelled and (though he doesn’t know it) doomed revolutionary of the last - André Chénier with a paint brush. The voice is inclined to thin out under pressure, but has real brilliance as well as a nice lyrical mode, on show here in “E lucevan le stelle” and “O dolci mani”. But everyone onstage is good: Alun Rhys-Jenkins’s cringing Spoletta, Ross Fettes’s bumbling Sacristan, and especially Max Fokkens’s Shepherd Boy (pictured left), singing his exquisite dawn song perched on the oculus of the dome from which Romaniw will later propel herself backwards in the most spectacular of Toscan suicides (main picture).

It would be idle to pretend that the reduced orchestra is 100 per cent okay. More warmth is often needed, and though Puccini’s wind scoring is so good that it’s nice to hear more of it, something is inevitably sacrificed in the louder, fuller stretches. Madaras nevertheless does wonders with these much put-upon players, and Tosca will never be quite the same again in my memory.

• Further performances of Tosca at Wales Millennium Centre on 18, 24 and 27 September, then on tour
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk