It was an unusual move on the part of music director Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to open the new season with opera. Billed originally as a concert performance, a quick process of morphing made it into a semi-staging - not the easiest exercise in the Symphony Hall, nor indeed in Tosca where it would seem to be Puccini's theatrical instinct that achieves a viable balance between the grand-scale and the intimate.

But the point made here was that it is in the orchestra where Puccini creates his perspectives, both physical and emotional. And Oramo's treatment of long, instrumental passages as though they were brief but intense tone-poems in the style of Elgar or Strauss was exciting, with string colours particularly luscious.

The three principal singers were equally strong. As Cavaradossi, Andrew Rees was full-blooded and more varied in tone and gesture than many, and Juha Uusitalo was a Scarpia of stature - sinister and oleaginous. Claire Rutter's Tosca was fiery, progressing from the obsessive character of early on to the passionate bravado of a woman who murders for love. Some of the impromptu nature of the staging was too obvious, Rutter's costume for one. Her first dress was so ill-fitting as to be distracting, although being barefoot gave her freedom of movement; her second was elegant, but stiletto heels proved an impediment to verismo, especially as she scampered to throw herself down the well behind the timpani.

Some imaginative touches helped heighten elements that do not always work in the theatre: the CBSO chorus turned to face the organ for the cantata (usually heard thinly off stage), while tubular bells in a high gallery evoked brilliantly the night soundscape of Rome. Oramo created a dynamic tension for the final act, to which Rutter and Rees responded heroically. Which opera house, one wonders, will be the first to pick up Oramo's signal?