I have been enjoying Lino Gatt’s feature L-Opra tal-Gimgħa on the radio for a very, very long time. The other day the fare fell on Puccini’s Tosca.

The way it was presented this time, as the opening work of the new autumn season on Radio Malta, was in many ways top class.

I have always admired Gatt for his initial scholarly commentaries. This time he embarked on comparing Victorien Sardou’s five-act drama La Tosca with the final Puccini’s three-act operatic reduction by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

He also went into the historical allusions behind the opera’s main characters. True, with today’s Wikipedia availability, things have become somewhat easier. But the resultant effort is no less demanding and thrilling, and I must thank him for his original  contributions.

In the same programme, apart from going, also, into the verismo operatic style scenario, commencing with Bizet and finishing up with Puccini and Giordano, he interspersed his commentary with some fleeting sublime excerpts on the strings, which was quite an innovation.

The end result was uniquely comparable to the operatic presentations on Campus FM by Abraham Borg, many years back.

We need this kind of presentation, involving a quantum leap from the boringly amateurish to the soberly professional.

Well done, Lino Gatt.