Deborah Voigt's withdrawal due to illness from this revival of Jonathan Kent's 2006 production leaves the field open for two Romanian divas to share the title role: Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miricioiu. Gheorghiu took the first night, returning to a staging she helped create when it was new.
In many ways, she's better now than when she sang Tosca three years ago. The scale of her singing matches the part more closely, and her acting is more considered. Even so, she retains a kittenish demeanour in the first act that feels contrived. Only in the great second-act confrontation with Bryn Terfel's Scarpia – also back from the 2006 lineup – does her voice take on a wide range of colours, and her acting assume an intelligent incisiveness.
Terfel's police chief, meanwhile, is a vocally prodigious and interpretatively outstanding creation. Unlike some of his predecessors, he does not attempt an aristocratic suavity in his delivery of the sadistic rapist; his Scarpia is a disturbed bully, brilliantly effective in his outsize malevolence, the sheer amplitude of his voice and his vivid use of words combining to create a melodramatic tour de force that maintains a shockingly keen psychological edge.
Marcello Giordani's Cavaradossi does not aspire to this level. Though he comes to dramatic life briefly during the torture scene, much of his performance is laid-back to the point of complacency. While Terfel and Gheorghiu are clearly aiming at artistic truth, Giordani is aiming at his top notes. These, however, are beyond magnificent, and nearly bring the ceiling down, twice.
Paul Brown's sets are cumbersome in the first act, serviceable in the second and strikingly atmospheric in the third. Jacques Lacombe's conducting begins in piecemeal fashion, but rises to an effectively coherent strategy later on.
In rep until Saturday. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
