The prima donna steals the show

Netrebko and Garança take the vocal laurels in a conventional Don Carlo at La Scala

Auto-da-fè: Anna Netrebko (Elisabetta) and Michele Pertusi (Filippo) with the Scala chorus Picture by Brescia e Amisano

No opera house opens its season with such grand éclat as the Teatro alla Scala. Milan’s gala season-opener (always December 7, feast day of Saint Ambrose, the city’s fourth-century patron) is a fixture in the calendar for a monied clientele - and for the noisy political protesters who are kept at bay on the Piazza della Scala by a formidable police presence. No-one without a ticket comes within 200 yards of the theatre, and the front doors are manned by pairs of sword-bearing carabinieri, unmissable in their bicorne hats surmounted by blue and red plumes.

For this year’s first night, La Scala’s music director, Riccardo Chailly, chose Don Carlo in the four-act version Verdi made expressly for this theatre in 1884. It was a disappointing choice, if not an untested one: La Scala’s lavish programme book prominently recalls the 1954 production, when Maria Callas (whose centenary was celebrated on December 2) sang her only performances of Elisabetta di Valois. Verdi evidently though better of his reduction when, two years after the 1884 Milan performances, he restored the original five-act version, now translated into Italian, for the theatre in Modena.