OPERA / An old idea, and then there was light

NEVER underestimate the potency of a suspended lightbulb. The one that dominates the lavatorial starkness of the set for David Alden's new production of Elektra at WNO may be one of the mail-order cliches of modern opera staging, but it is a cliche Alden seizes fearlessly with both hands and massages into what you might call a lightmotif for the whole piece.

You know it is going to be significant because there is a picture of it on the cover of the programme (together with a naked woman who, unless I blinked, fails to materialise); and sure enough, that bulb becomes a friend before the curtain falls. In the last scene Elektra hangs herself from its flex - an interesting variant on what Strauss asked for - and before that, illuminates the way of Aegisth into the palace brandishing a 1940s standard lamp with tassled shade. It looks ridiculous, the audience smirks, but the point is clear enough: Elektra (feigning courtesy and really ushering Aegisth to his death) is playing an arriviste regime at its own game. Aegisth and Klytamnestra are a tassled culture. In their evening dress, they could be ICI executives at Glyndebourne. But Elektra is the merciless, exposing conscience of the naked bulb, fixed over Agamemnon's blood. And the set design, perhaps, is just a fabrication of her psyche.

Tiled walls and hanging bulbs define the sort of place where 20th-century atrocities occur; but they could also be the clinical and purgative domain of an avenging mind. When this Elektra remembers the past, hands reach out from the subconscious of the under-stage to give her objects of recall, like Agamemnon's portrait. And at the point where her mind breaks, a great fissure divides the stage floor - which can't be an earthquake, because Aegisth steps daintily across it without noticing, so it presumably is an external symbol of internal trauma.

What all this amounts to is a production whose imagery you feel you've seen before, not least in Alden's own work (the ENO Boccanegra, Masked Ball, Oedipus . . .), with a radical chic more off-the-peg than off-the-wall. But the images survive their comedy potential and make vital theatre. These ideas also have the benefit of a superb trio of female principals - the opera's core requirement beyond which nothing, vocally, matters. Felicity Palmer's Klytamnestra cuts through the orchestral textures like a lubricated chain-saw, dynamic and exhilarating. Eva Maria Bundschuh's Chrysotemis, the character with the most grateful, luxuriantly Straussian lines, delivers them with the rich lustre of a mezzo-turned-soprano. And the American Janet Hardy is an Elektra of international calibre: comparable to a younger Gwyneth Jones in dimension, range and colour. For a company like WNO to pull together such a cast in such a show - heroically conducted by its new music director Carlo Rizzi - is no small achievement and promises much for the future.

Covent Garden, which must be wondering these days if it has a future, found its problems compounded on Tuesday when a bomb scare reduced what should have been the first night of Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi to a semi-staging, with perfunctory lighting and the principals sketching their roles in bare space while the chorus looked on. Jeremy Isaacs magnanimously offered everyone their money back.

But triumph reigned out of adversity. I Capuleti is a piece where the chorus mostly look on anyway, through a simple story based on Romeo and Juliet whose theatre belongs largely to the voice - a bel canto vehicle for the two leads, who are two women in that Romeo is written for a mezzo en travesti. Modern stagings sometimes transpose the role down to tenor, using a rescoring by Claudio Abbado. But that is to lose the effect of vocal interaction, sometimes at unison pitch, that Bellini obviously wanted between his lovers; and it's hard to imagine how the duets could be more exquisitely accomplished than here by Anne Sofie von Otter (in the trousers) and Amanda Roocroft (in the dress). Otter isn't as vigorous as she might be, but the clarity and beauty of the sound is captivating. As for Roocroft, there can be no doubt, now, that this still very young voice has great stature: radiant, articulate, and with a melting purity that makes refined work of Bellini's situazioni laceranti (heart-rending predicaments). Daniele Gatti, the conductor, has a comparably refined ear for a score whose crudely exposed orchestration needs all the help it can get. A shade more speed would brighten its romantic ardour; but in the improvisatory circumstances it worked better than anyone dared expect.

I had expected more of the Katya Kabanova that launched the 1992 Glyndebourne tour on Thursday. Normally the tour begins at Glyndebourne itself; but as Glyndebourne is currently a hole in the ground, things shifted to Sadler's Wells, the theatre where, 40 years ago, a young conductor called Charles Mackerras introduced the opera (and its composer Janacek) to the British public.

Glyndebourne's Katya is a 1988 production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, memorable for its sharp, stifling intensity and the combative colours of its sets (Tobias Hoheisel) which complement the colour-juggling of the score. That much survives, although the sets are trimmed for touring. What hasn't quite survived is the potency of the characterisation. Eiddwen Harry's Kabanicha is eloquent but small, prim, unelectrifying. Susan Bullock's Katya is vocally good but had not, on the first night, touched the bright but fragile nerve that brings the role to life. The light tenor of Timothy Robinson's Kudryash I liked a lot. David Angus's conducting less so.

The biggest loss, I think, was forward motivation. A new compendium of source material on the Janacek operas by the scholar John Tyrrell (out this month from Faber) makes it clear that Janacek expected Katya to gather momentum in something close to total continuity, with no breaks between scenes. Katya was to be swept by predestiny to her watery death - as she was when Andrew Davis conducted her thereto in the 1988 Glyndebourne Festival. If David Angus could do likewise, with the same verve and energy, this revival would be stronger.

'Elektra' continues Tues: 0222 394844; 'I Capuleti', Wed & Sat: 071-240 1066; 'Katya', Thurs, 071- 278 8916.