★★★★☆
It’s all there in Puccini’s opening bars: force and adrenaline, power and violence. Long before the sadistic Baron Scarpia makes his first entrance we hear his heavy footsteps and sense there’s going to be trouble. Those chords return, an orchestral reminder that, although Tosca charts the course of one woman’s passionate love, the veins of this opera throb with one man’s hatred.
Right from that taut introduction this is an orchestrally thrilling Tosca. The conductor Carlo Rizzi knows exactly what Puccini needs and he draws wonderful colours from Welsh National Opera’s orchestra. The pacing is precise, the playing supple and gripping. I could listen many times over to the hot-blooded brass, muscular strings and the despairing regret of the clarinet solo in Cavaradossi’s