Vocal brilliance in a WNO double date. Christopher Gray is stunned by Sarah Tynan’s performance in Boulevard Solitude

The annual spring visit to our region by Welsh National Opera — long since relocated from Oxford’s New Theatre to Milton Keynes — brought us a triple date with ladies of easy virtue in a programme entitled Fallen Women. Actually, this was in truth rather a double date, since our encounter with Verdi’s good-sort Violetta, in the opening night’s La Traviata, was followed later in the week by two meetings with another, distinctly more hard-headed, courtesan in operas based on Antoine-François Prévost’s Manon Lescaut.

The first came in a memorable, if puzzling, production of Puccini’s take on this scandalous 18th-century novel, his Manon Lescaut, which brought him instant fame in 1893. The second was in Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, dating from 1952, given to a hugely appreciative audience on Thursday night. Directed by Mariusz Trelinski in both cases and featuring designs (Boris Kudlicka) and lighting (Felice Ross) with some overlap in the supply of stunning, filmic visuals, the operas were thrilling to listen to, with WNO’s musical director Lother Koenigs in tight control of the wonderful company orchestra. Down in the pit, a good time was observably being had by all, in the Henze work especially, with its relentless percussive drive and flamboyant bursts of jazz.

The puzzle of the Puccini arose for this reviewer through seeing it ahead of Boulevard Solitude, which offered the same railway station setting, with chorus passengers moving automata-like around its platforms. Being rooted in this one place, rather than following Chiara Taigi’s admirably sung Manon in her progress through France and on to her eventual death in Louisiana with long-term lover Des Grieux (Gwyn Hughes Jones, looking an unlikely student), seemed merely perverse, until one found oneself here again for the later opera, the location at once suggestive of alienation and the ineluctable progress of life.

Clearly efforts were being made to present us with the same kinkily-attired femme fatale in both operas, Ms Taigi finding the necessary blonde wig more of a burden, it seemed, than Boulevard’s Sarah Tynan (if indeed wig it was). The latter’s was a vocal performance no less astonishing than her stockings and suspenders attire. By turns sweet toned and strident, she delivered, with seeming ease, in the eclectic styles — some harking back to the 18th century — demanded by the score.

Other fine vocal performances included, especially, those of Jason Bridges as Des Grieux, Adrian Thompson in the high buffo tenor role of the old roué Lalaque père and Laurence Cole as his son.

This was a night of rare brilliance.