Opera Australia’s spring season in Melbourne opened with John Bell’s production of Tosca, which had its première in Sydney, in June 2013. The company is now adding strong readings of masterworks to its repertoire: this Tosca preceded David McVicar’s brilliant production of Don Giovanni, first performed in Sydney in August and bound for Melbourne next autumn. Both productions are likely to stay in the repertoire for many years, though not perhaps quite as long as John Copley’s production of Tosca, which enriched the company for twenty-five years after its creation in 1981.

Few people had a good word to say for the intervening Tosca: Christopher Alden’s iconoclastic staging of 2010 (which this critic did not see). John Bell, perhaps in something of a reaction, takes few liberties with Puccini’s opera, though some traditionalists might be shocked by Floria Tosca’s fate: no vertiginous plunge from the battlements, but a machine-gunned death amid the barbed wire.