Old-school excess, star power and spectacle: Royal Opera's Tosca reviewed

London felt like its old self on Friday night. Possibly it was just me; when you visit the capital once a week, your impressions will only ever be snapshots. Still, it’s been a while since I’ve battled such a flood tide of commuters on the ramp at Euston, or since the Royal Opera House seemed to be buzzing quite so excitedly. Crowds were four deep at the champagne bar; a latecomer in a spangly tux squeezed past and into his seat, grinning a slightly tipsy apology. And at the heart of it all — the succulent hunk of well-aged rump steak generating all this sizzle — was a revival of Jonathan Kent’s lavish period staging of Puccini’s Tosca, with a marquee name in the title role.

That’d be Angela Gheorghiu, who headlined this production when it first appeared in 2006. Kent’s Tosca succeeded Zeffirelli’s, and Gheorghiu — then at the peak of her vocal glamour — was stepping into the shoes of Maria Callas. Sixteen years on, singer and production seem to have grown together, and the revival director Lucy Bradley has harnessed that energy. Gheorghiu’s Floria Tosca is impulsive but very vulnerable; if her voice doesn’t always carry over the orchestra (and from the first sulphurous brass chords, conductor Marco Armiliato loaded his brush with colour and laid it on thick) it still retains that untethered quality — suddenly looping weightlessly upward, velvety and glowing. When it tails off into silence — and no one does a piteous whimper quite like Gheorghiu — there’s a sweetness and fragility that carries you past the limitations of her acting, with its default setting of downstage arm-waving.