DAVID MELLOR
Tosca London Coliseum Until November 4 ★★★★★
English National Opera, these days seemingly a part-time company, returns to the Coliseum for the first time since April. This is a Christof Loy production from Finland in 2018, which Loy was too busy to return to rehearse, or even to attend the first night.
When George Harewood persuaded me, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to buy the Coliseum, it was to prevent it being sold for musicals. Ironically, the reason they have been away for so many months is to rent it out for My Fair Lady. George must be spinning in his grave.
So, between Easter and Christmas,
ENO will have put on three productions at the Coliseum, two of them lightweight, and a single performance of Britten’s Gloriana. Not much of a return for all that Arts Council loot, is it?
Better perhaps than ENO’s old habit of choosing directors with no experience of, or often even interest in, opera, to put on unrevivable shows. This is at least revivable.
The singing from the Irish soprano Sinéad Campbell-Wallace as Tosca, and the US-based English tenor Adam Smith as Cavaradossi, is lusty. They fill the auditorium but Campbell-Wallace isn’t diva-like enough, and Smith, though a find, pushes his tone way too much at times.
The American Scarpia, Noel Bouley (right, with Campbell-Wallace), had lost his voice so could only act. The singing was well done from the wings by the English bass Roland Wood. Given that he’s English, was free, and it’s English National Opera, why not pick him from the start?
Leo Hussain’s conducting, and excellent playing from the orchestra, offered much to enjoy. But Loy’s changes are invariably irritating, often silly and rarely, if ever, insightful.
Mixed period costumes fill the stage.
All the 18th Century ones, in pure white, are utterly effete and camp. Loy is entitled to that view of the ancien régime, but what’s it got to do with Tosca?
Act III, a real Puccini gem, is all but ruined by the beautiful orchestral introduction – with the shepherd boy singing as he drives his sheep past the Castel Sant’Angelo – becoming Cavaradossi’s dream in his cell about Tosca. Ugly set – and pointless.