Every winter, Welsh National Opera splits its forces. The chorus visits small venues while the orchestra and a clutch of singers offer a programme that is half orchestral and half opera.
This year, rather than a large chunk of a long opera, the so-called orchestra tour is presenting Il Tabarro, the first of the three one-act operas that make up Puccini's triptych. This pungent little drama, inspired by the gruesome one-acters at Paris's Grand Guignol theatre in Montmartre, is as good an introduction as any to opera. WNO's autumn season, including both Puccini's Tosca and Madam Butterfly, has just ended. Otherwise the principle of bringing converts to the full-blown medium might have been even better served.
But producer Benjamin Davis tried another tack. In the first half he staged three songs by Erik Satie in a cafe, allowing the audience to get to know faces and take on board the characters of Il Tabarro: a flirty and frustrated young wife and her tetchy older husband, ripe for cuckolding. By the second half, set on a Paris barge, the fundamentals of jealousy and anguish were planted firmly in the audience's mind, and the relationship of Giorgetta and Michele was firmly grasped.
This was partly thanks to Amanda Holden's colourful new translation of the libretto, in which the cloak of the title disappears, with the three-syllables of ta-bar-ro becoming "a great-coat". The cloak may have been lost, but a dagger was gained: Giorgetta's lover Luigi was stabbed rather than strangled.
This had the makings of a fine production, with strong performances by Naomi Harvey and Peter Sidhom as the married couple and David Barrell as Luigi. But WNO was trying too hard. Not content with one new approach, it experimented with imagesprojected at the back. The images, created by WNO artist in residence Emrys Williams, worked well enough. In theatres they will work better, but in a leisure centre hangar, the concept was lost: the staging marooned the orchestra behind, obscuring players and screen. Finer points of the orchestra's performance under Gareth Jones's baton of Poulenc's ballet suite Les Biches and Bernstein's overture to Candide were also lost.
There were perhaps too many ideas here for their own good. Perhaps WNO should remember that missionaries stick to the one book.
• On tour until January 19. Details: 0800 328 2357.
