Tosca/English National Opera, Coliseum, London <br></br>Daniel Barenboim, Royal Festival Hall, London <br></br>Musica Secreta, The Priory Church of St Bartholemew the Great, London

Listen carefully: this is what it's all about

With unusual honesty for one who makes his living directing operas, David McVicar has, on more than one occasion, gone on record as saying that most opera productions bore him. It's a feeling I share, but what keeps me going back for more – pay-packet aside – are the exceptions: those productions that so sweep you up in their moment that time races by and disbelief is suspended. It's a tall order for any live performance, requiring a synthesis of musical and dramatic excellence that is hard won in such a multi-faceted art-form, and not all of McVicar's shows have done it for me. Those that have – Scottish Opera's Madama Butterfly, The Rape of Lucretia and now Tosca for English National Opera – have done it big time.

What these productions share, in my view, is simplicity of expression; a characteristic of great theatrical and operatic productions and, perhaps most commonly, movies. When watching Casablanca – which shares Tosca's themes of romantic obsession and political resistance – for the first or even umpteenth time, you can hardly forget that it is a movie. Nonetheless, the awareness of that artifice assumes minimal importance in your response. You are made to care as much, or even more, about the story as you would were it real, all the while swallowing each drop of sentiment like good wine. Like Casablanca, McVicar's Tosca is quite measured in pace. Like Casablanca, it achieves suspension of disbelief in the face of over-familiarity. Like Casablanca, McVicar's Tosca makes melodrama sincere.

As I've mentioned before, opera suffers from too many chefs. But ENO has assembled a team of astonishing chemistry. In the pit, Mark Shanahan's unhurried, confident and expressive conducting perfectly mirrors McVicar's generous dramatic pace, Britgitte Reiffenstahl's opulent Napoleonic costumes, Paule Constable's incisive lighting, and the spacious diagonals of Michael Vale's set. This largesse has paid dividends. Doubtless delighted to be dressed in something more attractive than raincoats and underpants, ENO's chorus sounds magnificent, while the orchestra too shows a more focused tone than it has enjoyed of late.

In much the same fashion as Puccini's score, McVicar's staging works on several levels: bold thematic gestures – the giant cross overshadowing the interior of Sant'Andrea della Valle, the leisurely twisting of tension as the church fills for the Te Deum, the brutal beauty of the totalitarian architecture of the Castel Sant'Angelo – are balanced by the minute, vulnerable details that give this opera humanity over hysteria. Tosca, who, according to Sardou's play, is a mere bohemian slip of a girl, makes her first appearance barefoot. Cheryl Barker's tone – radiant, lissom, engaged and sparklingly easy – similarly underlines her youth and innocence; an innocence that, as McVicar bluntly reminds us in Act II, should not be confused with incurious chastity. Peter Coleman-Wright's agonised Scarpia has a brutal beauty about his carriage and voice, and a slightly Lecterish lubricity in his repeated sniffing of hands and hair (the one detail I found too mannered). John Hudson's Cavaradossi – richly sung and a quietly strong presence – seemingly hints that he suspects Tosca's planned escape is doomed, making his apparent indulgence of her fantasy the tenderest gesture of love left at his disposal. The interaction between all three is superb – encompassing ambivalence and commitment, rage and fatal curiosity – their singing among the best heard at this house.

That McVicar has given an anxious company exactly what it needs – a clear, absorbing and attractive production of a hugely popular work – at a crucial point has been mentioned by several critics already. For all this, Tosca could – if misinterpreted by the Coliseum's interim management – prove to be the undoing of English National Opera as we know it. Let's hope that those in charge understand that Tosca works not simply because it is core repertoire but because it is a sensitive, cohesive and thoroughly committed musical and dramatic interpretation. ENO does not need to turn to the canon for its survival. (Purely in terms of public service, no listener could get as much out of Tosca from only listening to Puccini any more than they could grasp the significance of Nixon in China if they've scarcely listened to Bach.) It simply needs to ensure that all of its productions – be they traditional or modern – are as well-executed as this.

Reading Daniel Barenboim's memoir, A Life in Music, I was struck by one passage: "With the piano, the concept of beauty starts with two notes. As soon as one note is softer or louder or shorter, and you are able to to articulate the difference between two notes, you can begin to create an expressive sound on the piano. If you take this to its logical, almost ridiculous conclusion, you see that one of the most important qualities required for playing the piano is an ability to create what painters call perspective." Well, it's not often that a performer pre-empts their own review but I can't better that as a description of what Barenboim brought to Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt in his recital at the Royal Festival Hall.

Age has brought some stiffness to his right hand but in terms of communicating a musical philosophy, Barenboim is hard to fault. His is grand, quite old-fashioned, almost orchestrated playing, which implies the different colours of wind, brass and strings through what he calls this "neutral, uninteresting instrument". Is this necessarily a good thing? I'd quibble with orchestrating the Appassionata, which plainly doesn't need it, but Liszt's Petrarch Sonnets benefited beautifully from Barenboim's painterly approach. More surprisingly Mozart's C major sonata K330 blossomed under a sheen of Romantic characterisation – lending the coda of the Andante cantabile that sweet air of regret one associates with his slow arias – while Barenboim's first encore, Scarlatti's E major sonata, had a beauty that goes beyond changing tastes in performance practice.

On Wednesday, Musica Secreta celebrated the 400th birthday of Cozzolani, spinning spine-tingling sounds across the nave of St Bartholemew the Great. Cozzolani, who he? Wrong question. Cozzolani was a nun, who – like Caterina Assandra and Lucrezia Vizzana – wrote music for her convent in Milan; some of it merely better than Rovetta, some as inspired as Luzzaschi or Carissimi. To single out soloists from this wonderful 16-voice consort of women would be unfair to the whole, but eager eared listeners can catch the concert on Radio 3's Music Restored, this Thursday. Gorgeous.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'Tosca': The Coliseum, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) to 30 November.