Bryn Terfel has spent the last fortnight as artist in residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, bringing his series of concerts to a close with a couple of performances as Scarpia in a semi-staging of Tosca, conducted by Vasily Petrenko and directed by Amy Lane.

Scarpia has long been one of Terfel's greatest roles, and Lane's uncluttered approach allows the depth of his characterisation to register with tremendous force. He sings and acts with an astonishing refinement that heightens our awareness of the man's innate corruption. We get a strong sense of the voluptuary as well as the sadist. Picking up a rope of pearls that Victoria Yastrebova's Tosca has left in church, he twists it round his fingers with sinister grace during the Te Deum. Later on, as he homes in on her, the boundaries between seduction and aggression chillingly begin to blur.

You'd be wrong, however, if you thought this was a one-man show. There's a outstanding Cavaradossi, one of the finest of recent years, from Vladimir Galouzine, entirely convincing as artist, lover and revolutionary, his singing dark, thrilling and wonderfully insistent. Yastrebova's Tosca is less overtly fiery, more vulnerable than some. Her voice gleams at the top, but the orchestra engulfs her lower registers at times. The choir sound terrific yet too big. Puccini, you gradually realise, is difficult to balance away from the theatre: Petrenko's conducting dazzles and excites but doesn't – and probably can't – resolve the problem.

Lane, however, manages some fine things in a difficult space for opera. Evening dress offsets the brutality as social constraints begin to crack. Tim Baxter's creepy video projections – a hawk fastening on its prey, a bloody moon, the firing squad emerging through fog – add to the menacing atmosphere of it all. Compelling, despite occasional imperfections.

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