Tosca: thrilling new Puccini staging has ‘tremendous emotional force’

Opera lovers arriving at Covent Garden this week for the start of the new season were greeted by Ukrainian flags and scores of picketing protesters. “While she sings, Ukraine bleeds,” read the placards, while megaphoned messages were yet angrier. “There’s blood all over the floor of the Royal Opera House tonight,” said one.

No, the controversial casting of the great Russian soprano Anna Netrebko – who was previously banned by houses across Europe owing to her historical support for Vladimir Putin’s regime – in the Royal Opera’s new production of “Tosca” did not pass without a fuss, said Richard Morrison in The Times.

Netrebko has publicly denounced her country’s invasion of Ukraine, but her critics want her to speak out against Putin too. The Metropolitan Opera in New York continues to ban her (she is suing them), but she will be singing in several European capitals this winter – and more protests are likely. None of this appears to faze her, however. “At 53, she still portrays Tosca, the volatile opera singer who gets tangled up in the politics of a repressive regime, with white-hot passion and a matchless range of vocal and visual nuance.”

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I detected nerves to start, said Barry Millington in The London Standard; but these had settled by the time Netrebko had to deliver her big Act II aria, “Vissi d’arte” – “exploiting her rich, darkly expressive lower range and her glorious top alike, holding the beautifully floated final notes for an eternity”. And the audience was thunderous in its approval.

Set in a “chilling” dictatorship, Oliver Mears’s terrific staging is also blessed with a “mettlesome Cavaradossi of baritonal heft” in Freddie De Tommaso, said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times. Gerald Finley brilliantly conveys Scarpia’s “slimy depravity”. And holding it all together from the pit, with tremendous confidence, is Covent Garden’s new music director Jakub Hruša, said Flora Willson in The Guardian. He makes space for “moments of beauty”, but mines from the “darkest, grittiest passages of Puccini’s score a performance of tremendous emotional force”.

Royal Opera House, London WC2. Until 7 October, rbo.org.uk