Lulu, WNO, at Wales Millennium Centre, review

David Pountney’s new production of Lulu at Welsh National Opera, his first production since taking up the reins of the company, signals Cardiff’s overdue return to the operatic vanguard.

After several years of playing it safe, WNO is programming adventurously again, and Berg’s masterpiece may be an indication of things to come: an uncomfortable opera for performers and audiences alike, but a deeply rewarding one too.

There is much to reflect on in this staging, not least because of its ambiguity. Is Lulu a victim or a vamp? No obvious answers are given here, since Pountney’s protagonist, as sung by the soprano Marie Arnet, performs with more security than sensuality.

But she is still convincing as the flame to which all moths are drawn, including that of the Countess Geschwitz, so strongly cast in Natascha Petrinsky that this becomes the opera’s most meaningful relationship.

Thanks to Johan Engels’s cage-like set, the men in Lulu’s life are more than ever like zoo animals, and Richard Angas’s vivid Animal Tamer, complete with eye patch and spear, rather fascinatingly resembles the Wanderer in Wagner’s Siegfried.

But despite the colour-coding of Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes, there is little sense of who – or where – these characters are. Further alienation derives from the disembodied, vintage radio-style voices piped in for the dialogue.

In a work all about symmetries, the multiple roles are brilliantly carried off by a cast including Ashley Holland, Mark Le Brocq, Alan Oke and Peter Hoare. But no one is more impressive than the conductor Lothar Koenigs.

Using Eberhard Kloke’s recently completed version of Act III, slightly tighter than the familiar Cerha solution, Koenigs draws a performance of incredible lucidity and warmth.

To Feb 23, then touring to Apr 2; www.wno.org.uk