A year on from the spectacular Ring cycle celebrating Wagner's bicentenary, people might be forgiven for perceiving Longborough Festival Opera's 2014 season as a bit quiet. Not a bit of it.
There were details in their new production of Puccini's Tosca which struck me as totally well-found, not least the hint of a relationship between the actress Floria Tosca (at once pious and voluptuous) and chief of police Scarpia (torn between religious zeal and manipulatory lust) which might easily have flowered. And the other one was the thought that Tosca might stab herself to death before realising she could kill the Scarpia about to rape her.
And these details in Richard Studer's always astute direction came through in an extraordinarily sensitive performance from Lee Bisset as Tosca, her body-language so subtle (anyone not concentrating on her face will have missed so much), her vocal delivery rich, confiding, cajoling, and magisterial right to its splendour at her eventual suicide.
Simon Thorpe's Scarpia was dangerously honeyed, but perhaps not heavy enough for the great Te Deum scene, and perhaps losing a little control at the top of phrases in his crucial, seduction-plotting Act Two. Adriano Graziani had similar issues as he launched into Cavaradossi (here depicted as Tosca's initially bored, work-obsessed lover), but warmed to the role via a gruelling torture-scene and then into the touching pre-execution scenario.
The set-design was stark and resourceful, one of Longborough's trademarks, the orchestra under Jonathan Lyness was tremendous (though why no organ for the Te Deum?), but the costumes were a mess. Uniforms and men's-casual were fine for this Mussolini-period staging, but Tosca's ridiculously tight-fitting short-skirted off-the-peg outfit in Act One did the great diva no favours at all.
