Tosca, Grange Park Opera review ★★★★★

The meadow-like gardens around Grange Park Opera’s Theatre in the Woods are in exuberant full bloom, and audience members might be forgiven for being in summery light spirits as they take their seats. But they are quickly shaken out of this idyll by the dramatic opening chords of Puccini’s opera Tosca, heralding a tale of revenge, lust, murder and suicide.

Those opening chords define Scarpia, the villainous bully who dominates this opera, and the test for any production is whether it can maintain its momentum after Scarpia’s death at the end of Act 2, his threat apparently defused. But here’s no danger of losing the tension here, with the audience gripped right to the tragic end.

One key to that is that in Stephen Medcalf’s 1930s-set production, the voices of the singer Tosca, her painter lover Cavaradossi and the scheming Scarpia are well balanced. Polish soprano Izabela Matula, as Tosca, is pure diva, dressed in an elegant fur-lined blue coat as the jealous lover in Act 1 and then all passion in a fiery red dress in Act 2 as she hears her lover being tortured and makes her fateful bargain with Scarpia: her virtue for her lover’s freedom.

Baritone Brett Polegato as Scarpia. Photo: Marc Brenner

Her lover Cavaradossi, played by the handsome Georgian tenor Otar Jorjika, cuts a fittingly intellectual figure as the artist absorbed in his work in the opening scene in the church. However, there is nothing merely cerebral about his heartfelt aria, a love letter to life itself, in Act 3, 'E lucevan le stelle', as he prepares to face death.

As Scarpia, the authority figure full of vengeance and lust, Canadian baritone Brett Polegato evokes a mafia boss in his sharp double-breasted suit. He swaggers as he proclaims to the heavens in the closing scene in Act 1 his plan to execute Cavaradossi and seduce Tosca. The character received full marks from a policeman in the audience for his detective work in tracking down an escaped prisoner.

Among deft directorial touches, at the end of Act 1, as the congregation gathers in the church for prayer Scarpia mounts the scaffold where Cavaradossi has been painting, glorifying himself and Tosca, not God. And in the fascist palace of Act 2 (design by Francis O’Connor), there is graphic butchery to illustrate the depths to which this ruthless man will sink.

Tosca and Cavaradossi face their future. Photo: Marc Brenner

The BBC Concert Orchestra, under conductor Mark Shanahan, brings out the full glory of Puccini’s score. In the slow opening of the final act, evoking dawn on the ramparts of Rome's Castel Sant’Angelo, we hear the awakening city, first with birdsong-like woodwind, then lingering strings, and finally the magnificent sequence of eleven different bells ringing out. It beautifully builds the tension, leading up to the appearance of the two lovers and their tragic – albeit, in this production, unconventional – end.

The 20^th-century British composer Benjamin Britten said that he was ‘sickened by the cheapness and emptiness’ of Tosca. He might have changed his mind if he had seen this production, rich in drama and full of emotion.

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Tosca is sung in Italian, with English surtitles. Further performances are on 21, 24, 28 June; 2, 5 July