WNO: Wozzeck / La Traviata, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Glittering Berg on the bay

After the months of turmoil and the unhappy departure of its overhyped music director, Tugan Sokhiev, Welsh National Opera must be mighty relieved to have been back on the boards of its new home in the Wales Millennium Centre at the weekend.

After the months of turmoil and the unhappy departure of its overhyped music director, Tugan Sokhiev, Welsh National Opera must be mighty relieved to have been back on the boards of its new home in the Wales Millennium Centre at the weekend.

Still, one can't help wondering why no heads have rolled over that miserable episode; why the WNO masthead still proclaims the same general director; why the whole wretched business has been airbrushed out and Carlo Rizzi reinstated as director as if the past three years had never existed.

Not that Rizzi's return is unwelcome. The exquisite first half-dozen bars of La Traviata were an instant rebuke to Sokhiev's inadequacy when this production was new in May. Still, WNO will presumably have to reappoint soon, and it would be comforting to feel that the next incumbent might be chosen by somebody more sure-footed in these matters than the current administration.

As for hype, the Millennium Centre could show them all a thing or two. An airport-terminal of a building set on a windswept piazza, it has quickly established itself as an official touchstone of Welsh pride, a slightly upmarket Olympic bid. Whether it will appeal as a home for what has always been a rather compact, intimate touring opera company remains to be seen. But on the musical evidence of the Verdi revival and Saturday's new Richard Jones production of Berg's Wozzeck, the omens are good.

In particular, the theatre is an acoustical triumph, with wonderfully clear, balanced sound even in (my spies tell me) the topmost seats and certainly in the stalls, and with uniformly excellent sightlines. It's a big arena, perhaps not lending the ideal warmth to the voices in La Traviata. But Berg's score, which cradles the singers in light, springy chamber textures, sounds good: every voice audible, the words as clear as can be, the instruments both blended and distinct - like Bayreuth, and that's a huge compliment.

It helps, no doubt, that the music is so beautifully sung and played under the brilliant Vladimir Jurowski, and that Jones's production (designer Paul Steinberg) keeps the singers well upstage within the shallow perspective of what is variously the production line, the staff quarters, and finally the waste-disposal unit of a baked-bean cannery, depressingly walled in brown plywood, with long benches and an ever-growing scarlet rubbish skip.

As an image of Wozzeck's life, this is fine, though it contradicts what is sung at almost every point. When Wozzeck bludgeons Marie with a tin can, then hunts for "the knife", which "sinks in deep water" in the form of a skip-load of cans, one feels an unwanted layer of surrealism added to what is in essence a realist tragedy.

Of course, there's no "blood-red moon", no grey mist - most problematical of all, no soldiers, in a story soaked in militarism, hardly an untopical motif. Literal-mindedness is, I know, the bane of opera criticism: but then, Jones's image is literal, too, the relentless pursuit of the one idea that Wozzeck is terrorised by a doctor who makes him eat beans. Berg's work is subtler and richer than this.

Not subtler, though, than Jurowski makes it, with his mastery of detail and of the geography of stage and pit. This is one of the securest, best-played Wozzecks I can remember, as well as one of the most stylish and moving. The cast is entirely superb: Christopher Purves a marvellous, almost bel canto yet shambling Wozzeck; Gun-Brit Barkmin a lovely, lyrical Marie, sluttish and sexy enough to explain the horrid things that happen to her; and there is strong support, from Peter Hoare's Captain (for some reason, an air steward), Clive Bayley's mad Doctor, and Peter Svensson's Drum-Major; here a golf professional who, surprisingly, tells Marie they'll breed drum-majors.

'La Traviata' tours to 12 April; 'Wozzeck' tours to 14 April (029-2063 5000; www.wno.org.uk)