Welsh National Opera shares the Wales Millennium Centre with smaller arts companies - an arrangement initially aimed at securing funding. But this setup is creating a more lasting artistic legitimacy through collaborative projects, of which The Most Beautiful Man from the Sea is the most significant to date.

Its starting point was a Gabriel García Márquez story in which the body of a man washed up on shore is a catalyst for change in a worn-out fishing village; the metaphor for a community in an old port where music is the impulse for progress is explicit enough. Gwyneth Lewis's libretto achieves an adroit balance between poetry and function, with the emotive and lyrically evocative lines no more carefully weighted than those identifying characters and pushing the story along. Richard Chew and Orlando Gough's music also seeks a balance where deceptively simple thematic material can be woven into a complex web and embrace big feelings, using dance rhythms to create an intrinsic energy.

It is hardly surprising that an opera should morph into oratorio so as to accommodate 400 singers along with WNO soloists and orchestra, but the initial haze of greens, blues and greys disguised the serried ranks and strikingly established the symbiotic relationship of people with sea.

Designer Richard Aylwin's backdrop of video images compensated for the necessarily static nature of the action, with Iain Patterson's drowned man a glowing, iconic figure reborn as a proud sea-captain. Though the vibrant funeral sequence featuring the Tredegar Brass Band was most engaging, Chew and Gough's music did not ultimately suggest the emotional journey as forcefully as it might and the words were often clouded in mist. Nevertheless, this was a heartfelt statement of intent.