Audience rendered handless by Opus 1

Opus 1, a British-based company, proffering traditional productions of the standard operas, are an ideal schooling and blooding for operatic audience newcomers. Of that audience's pesence in numbers there is little doubt, owing to the interest in the genre generated by modern marketing and popular usage on TV as well as on Classic FM.

A survey was needed. How many of the ample Worthing audience were seeing Tosca for the first time? How many were, indeed, seeing an opera for the first time? How many did not know when to allow themselves to applaud? It must have been disconcerting to the singers to get no feedback, not least Sarah Estill as Tosca herself after falling to her knees to deliver her famous Vissi D'arte (I have lived for art), immortalised by Maria Callas and the obvious crux of the opera in its revelation of the true character of the prima donna Tosca.

Or perhaps, as crusaders and teachers among the under-initiated and the keenly curious, Opus 1's artistes expect this.

This was my first Tosca. I had read up about it, so I could follow much of it in the absence of surtitles - the stage version of TV's subtitles. And here, with a number of opera companies visiting Worthing on provincial tours, it is now time to invest in the simple technology of surtitles at our two main theatres.

Not that Opus 1 would use it, though: they do without; their policy is that it is a distraction to the onlooker. I'd dispute that. It's good enough for Glyndebourne. I loved Rossini's Cinderella there last year because surtitles let me get all the jokes. Come on, now, show me an average new British opera goer who is multilingual . . .

I have sensed, having also tasted Rigoletto (Verdi) last year in Brighton, that Italian opera is not my favourite. You're allowed individual taste, of course, in all this but I got much out of this Opera 1 Tosca. They made me respond as I ought to have done.

This is a nasty story but one reflecting scenarios not only in highly political arenas but in the everyday theatres of mundane civilian life.

Estill won my sympathy and so did Jim Heath's doomed artist and political activist, Mario Cavaradossi. Although I found his tone a little thin and therefore imbalanced against that of his volatile lover Tosca in their duets.

I was immensely distrustful of French-Indian London native Samuel de Beck Splitzer, whose head of police Scarpia was compacently evil. Splitzer, if anything, stole the show.

Opus 1 have a live orchestra, though with strings this time pared down to a quartet plus double bass. Puccini's noted mastery of orchestration as a musical illumination of the action and the on-stage emotions, scarcely suffered. All the wind, brass and most of the percussion colour was still available. Intonation was excellent.

Opus 1 Opera come back with Rossini's The Barber Of Seville on September 30 (8pm). The council needn't panic about my surtitles suggestion for this production. It'll be sung in English.

Richard Amey