Whether Mr Blair had 18th-century opera in mind as he jetted from Lisbon to Libya isn’t clear, and “Tony in Tripoli” doesn’t quite have the ring of Nixon in China, but who knows? Handel opera is seriously fine stuff: and, to prove it, this week London had both the jet set and the locals.
Once William Christie and his Zurich Opera brigade were five minutes into Radamisto at the Royal Festival Hall, you wondered why anyone else bothers. “Nature counsels mercy now,” someone proclaims near the close of Handel’s Sosarme, which was originally set in Portugal. There’s no element of nobility or honour or pride.” All, surely, great qualities in the inner life of a great operatic bass.One of the few major bass roles Tomlinson has not yet essayed is Marshal Kutuzov in Prokofiev’s War and Peace. Covent Garden could do a lot worse than to follow Lady Macbeth with the only other truly great 20th-century Russian opera and Tomlinson, with his reading of Cyrillic script and his wonderfully enunciated Russian – not to mention his singing and his acting – seems made for it.’Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’: Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000), Thursday and 5, 8, 14, 17 and 20 April. I saw Tomlinson before rehearsals had begun and I can’t be sure that neither he nor Jones was joking when he said that all he knew at this point what that it was to be set in Alaska, which, if true, is a little odd for so quintessentially Russian an opera.But it is at least clear that Tomlinson is looking forward to doing Boris Ismailov because “it’s both highly comical and deeply sinister I think Boris is the most horrible man I’ve ever played He’s completely seedy. But he did admit that if he had to stop singing the great roles (not – he hoped – for another 10 years) he could well turn to either straight acting or to directing.When I asked about his unusual beginning as a civil engineer, he said that there was great integrity in engineering and science which was useful to him and his operatic work It also teaches you to think logically.

The closest he came to criticism of some of today’s operatic excesses was: “I don’t believe that in the arts anything goes. It can be so ‘creative’ that it loses integrity.”One can’t help wondering what he – and we – will make of the Richard Jones version of Lady Macbeth when it is revealed this week. When I pointed out that in the recent Lady Macbeth at the Monnaie, Donald McIntyre (whom Tomlinson regards as the greatest Wotan of the preceding generation), had sung the tiny role of the Old Convict at the end, Tomlinson observed that he wasn’t sure that five weeks of intensive rehearsal for so little singing would appeal to him. As he put it when we spoke: “When he goes on stage he knows that he’s got to kill his mother in 20 minutes That’s a huge psychological weight to carry… The thing about being an opera singer, rather than a straight actor, is that you are synthesising your performance from the music that’s been written.”We spoke about the ageing process in singers and he said that it meant that it took longer to warm up, in the same way that ageing athletes take longer to regain muscle tone. His range is extraordinary, from Bluebeard to Leporello, from the four baddies in Tales of Hoffmann to Attila and Oberto (which he directed as well as starred in at Opera North). Perhaps the most striking was his shaggy, white sheepskin-clad, hippy Oreste in Strauss’s Elektra, an operatic character who cannot be more than 25 years old.

Tomlinson not only sang faultlessly but he made you feel that he really was this tormented, conflicted young man, driven on by his victimised, crazy sister. Apart from some Gilbert and Sullivan at university he had never done any stage work before he trained, but is clearly a natural and has profited from working with such directors as Ian Judge, Jonathan Miller and Harry Kupfer. As the Machiavellian Cardinal Borromeo in Pfitzner’s Palestrina he manipulates and inspires the hapless Palestrina, the blocked composer, with such fire and skill that hearing and seeing him, as I did, he seemed in the pomp of his puffed up rages, almost to levitate.Tomlinson must be the only celebrated international opera star to have a degree in Civil Engineering, which he earned at Manchester University before training as a singer for four years with a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music. As Gollaud in Debussy’s Pell? et M?sande (to be revived at Glyndebourne this summer), he provides this rather terrifying man with great dignity, so that we don’t merely hate him. His Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier was far from wise but Tomlinson made his preposterous lechery and his comical vanity into a figure of fun who never entirely forfeited our sympathy. His other Wagner roles, almost equally admired, include Gurnemanz, Hunding and Hagen, but he is far more versatile than that would suggest.

He has also sung major roles by Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Handel and Monteverdi. When we met backstage at Covent Garden I reminded him of something the director Steven Pimlott had said of Seneca in Monteverdi’s Poppaea: “he’s played by a bass and, like all good basses from Sarastro onwards, what he says must be right!” to which Tomlinson replied that yes, basses, on the whole are wise.But, of course, like most generalisations, this does not hold up, particularly among some of Tomlinson’s greatest roles. A flowing mane of greying hair and a luxuriant beard give him a faintly piratical air and equip him to give vent to his gifts as an actor which, almost uniquely among world-class operatic basses, are fully equal to his vocal powers. For a decade now he has been the Wotan of choice among Wagnerians and de rigueur in the role at Bayreuth. The third major role, that of the father-in-law Boris, is taken by John Tomlinson who sings the role for the first time.Tomlinson, at 57, is in his prime.