Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

IT WOULD be wonderful to report that Opera Ireland ended its 69-year history in a blaze of glory. However, the new production of Puccini's Toscadirected by Jakob Peters-Messer, with sets by Markus Meyer and costumes by Sven Bindsell, and Gianluca Martinenghi conducting the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, makes that impossible.

The church setting of the first act is awkward. A none too large room squats in the middle of the stage, with Cavaradossi’s painting covering both walls and ceiling. The woman in the painting is dark-haired, but Tosca still refers to her as blonde.

There’s open access to the Attavanti chapel where the escaped prisoner Angelotti has to hide, but he still has to find a key to get through the door in the wall of the room. Scarpia later walks freely through that open space, even though the Sacristan has protested that a key to the clearly redundant door is necessary.

There’s no desk in Scarpia’s apartment in Act II, only chairs, lots of them, which are used to express violence in various ways and also as resting places for food, drink, and writing paper. And the twist in Act III is that the back of the stage has footlights pointed into the auditorium, and the chorus assembles at the far side of them, dressed as a theatre audience. Tosca retreats from the lights, and freezes in front of where the curtain will drop to suggest she’s about to jump into the orchestra pit. Okay. There’s probably some point being made about all the world being a stage in Act II. But the production is a rather sorry affair.This wouldn’t matter so much if the musical end of the evening were better.

But there’s a tenor Marcelo Puente’s Cavaradossi, who seems to be stuck at full volume, to the point where you would fear for the future of his voice. And there’s a bass Dimitri Platanias’s Scarpia, who begins more impressively in the same mode, but loses steam in the face of the sound volume that Martinenghi delivers from the pit.

It’s actually Martinenghi, not Scarpia, who’s the real villain of this piece. He’s one of those conductors who seems unwilling to accommodate singers, either in terms of orchestral balances or the shaping of musical line.

The singer who suffered most was Orla Boylan, whose Tosca is appropriately jealous, flirtatious and protective with Cavaradossi, and defiant with Scarpia.

She’s got a genuine vocal heft no one else in the cast can match, but all too often her attempts to broaden a tempo for vocal inflection were stymied by the rigidity of the conducting.

The audience liked the the edge-of-the-seat effects, and gave the principals a rousing reception.

Runs until Sunday 21st