Puccini Festival
Torre del Lago, Tuscany Until Saturday
Tosca
La Bohème
Rating: 
Giacomo Puccini rented a cottage in Torre del Lago for no better reason than that it was cheap. And discreet. His mistress (later his wife) Elvira Gemignani had a son by him.
And this was somewhere they could live openly together, which they couldn’t in his nearby home town of Lucca. Here, Puccini, in the words of a cynical friend, pursued his three great passions: ‘shooting, smoking and f******’.
And also, of course, creating a few operas. Both La Bohème and Tosca were mainly composed here.
Tosca, Maria Guleghina, celebrated her 60th birthday this month. She’s too old for the part. She is matched wobble for wobble by her Cavaradossi, José Cura
The Puccini Festival, now in its 65th year, these days takes place in an ugly lakeside building that looks like a nuclear waste processing plant. But the open-air theatre on top is mightily impressive: 3,000 seats and a huge stage.
The sets are massive, with the ones for Tosca magnificent. Puccini identified where Tosca is set: the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Farnese Palace and the Castel Sant’Angelo. And that’s what you get here.
In Act 1, there’s space for four dozen choir members to frolic around in the church before the sudden entrance of the police chief Scarpia and his men brings their jollifications to an abrupt halt.
Mimi, Angela Gheorghiu, gives us her usual diva act. She sings Mimi’s notes without much of an attempt to portray the character. She does it her way, and that’s not the way for David Mellor
A truly spine-chilling moment, brilliantly scored by Puccini, and expertly presented here by the festival’s music director Alberto Veronesi and his orchestra. The composer would have loved it!
As Scarpia, the Mexican baritone Carlos Almaguer makes up for his lack of inches with plenty of rasp and menace during his credo, which precedes the grand entrance of the cardinals, a spectacle that thrills.
Sadly, the festival’s casting is as erratic as it is at English National Opera. Almaguer, in his early 40s, is in his vocal prime, but Tosca, Maria Guleghina, celebrated her 60th birthday this month.
She’s too old for the part, with much of her singing little better than pitched yelling. She is matched wobble for wobble by her Cavaradossi, José Cura. Hearing them together is like chucking yourself head-first into a bath of partially set jelly.
But I still give this Tosca high marks because of the overarching sense of theatre that sweeps all objections aside. Illuminating this is the opening of the third act, depicting dawn at the Castel Sant’Angelo, complete with a shepherd boy singing to his sheep as he drives them along.
This often goes for nothing but here a musical urchin catches Puccini’s vision completely so that by the time the sun rose for Cavaradossi’s execution, our musical and visual senses have already been sated.
As for Bohème, the least said the soonest mended. It looks pretty but the direction is clumsy and the conducting flat. Only Stefan Popp’s mellifluously sung Rodolfo is memorable.
His Mimi, Angela Gheorghiu, gives us her usual diva act. She sings Mimi’s notes without much of an attempt to portray the character. She does it her way, and that’s not the way for me.
My seat, 12 rows back, with a group of Mail on Sunday readers on a special trip, cost €110; less than half the price of the best seat at a country house opera. Torre del Lago being in Chiantishire, and Chiantishire being part of England, there are lots of Brits.
Well worth joining them.