Peter Rose reviews

Sir Simon Rattle’s first Tosca was always going to be an event. Whether it was intended to be this kind of event is difficult to tell. The extremes of tempo and colour from the Berlin Philharmonic in the first minutes of Philipp Himmelmann’s Baden-Baden Easter Festival production are enough to make one’s hair stand on end: a visceral rush of energy that deliquesces into an oily pool of heavily perfumed sound, reminiscent of being trapped in a high-performance sports car with a man who is wearing far too much aftershave.