A supercharged, superstar Tosca

Tosca
Royal Opera House
****

With a line-up of superstars for Covent Garden's new Tosca, the only fear was that one of them might have injured their metatarsal. But all was well.

No-one was summoned from the operatic substitutes' bench and the world's top diva, Angela Gheorghiu, together with the dazzling Argentinian tenor Marcelo Alvarez and the Welsh phenomenon that is Bryn Terfel, led the cast in the Royal Opera's first new staging of Puccini's shocker - let's forget shabby or little; this is a masterpiece - for 42 years.

After 230 performances and a catalogue of leaping divas, the old Zeffirelli production, made for Callas, has been scrapped. Theatre director Jonathan Kent has created a new vehicle for La Gheorghiu.

But as yet this new staging has a long way to go to fulfil all the promise and hype. Paul Brown's traditional but cumbersome sets are a major problem, especially in Act I where the fatal symmetry of a double balustrade freezes the action, forcing the eye to a vacuum at the centre.

The rickety iron work and two tier division didn't help: in the grand Te Deum, the processing chorus was cramped aloft, out of sight. The second act is dominated b y sculpture Damien Hirst might envy and Act III is merely drab.

Kent's staging is neutral, which is to say most of the energy seems to flow from individual performances with some ill-advised downstage singing which, given the scale of the sets, deadened the sound.

That said, with only two-star sets and three-star production, the cast was a resounding full-house five, and no evening with these singers could fail to excite.

Gheorghiu and Alvarez took a while to warm up but the moment Terfel arrived and sang Scarpia's menacing opening notes, the impact was as electrifying as sticking wet fingers in a live socket. His performance throughout was mesmerising.

Puccini is core repertoire for the Royal Opera's music director Antonio Pappano. Beloved of singers, he has a golden touch when it comes to handling the reputedly tricky Gheorghiu. She sang Tosca for him for the 2002 Benoit Jacquot film but this was her first stage performance.

Her Vissi d'arte had all the beauty and finesse we expect from this incomparable singer, but as yet her characterisation remains pallid. If she opens up and becomes more voluptuous, she will triumph.

Alvarez's Cavaradossi rang out with thrilling top notes and an exquisite E lucevan le stelle, with tender clarinet solo.

This is not an opera for the anxious. One production, perhaps at the insistence of a nervous soprano, had the heroine float off into the sky a la Mary Poppins. Other Toscas have bounced up again, embarrassingly, after their death leap owing to over-responsive-mattressing backstage.