The British stage premiere of Maria de Buenos Aires should have been an important event. Astor Piazolla called his only stage work, a "tango operita", but it's more than just a conventional operetta spiced with some of Piazolla's unfailingly potent melodies. The composer and his librettist, Horacio Ferrer, used this story of Maria, a kind of Latin-American Lulu, whose rags-to-riches rise and fall is turned into a metaphor for the whole history of the tango itself. The score is a patchwork of narration, songs and instrumental numbers, the whole mixture bound together by Piazzolla's magical invention. First performed in Buenos Aires in 1968, it gave a whole new dimension to the tango.

The version put on by the Covent Garden Festival, the work of the group I Fiamminghi, and imported from Belgium, was such a musical and theatrical travesty that little of the work's power and even less of its dramatic coherence survived. Remorselessly amplifying the band and the voices squeezed all the charm out of Piazzolla's music, and made the text (sung in Spanish) incomprehensible, while the badly danced tangos and preening gestures of the verismo staging credited to Frank van Laecke, bore so little relationship to Ferrer's scenario that anyone without prior knowledge of the score would have been totally lost. It was a desperately disappointing evening.