Royal Opera House

27, 30 January; 2, 5, 11, 13, 17 February
Stephen Gould; Nadja Michael; Gerald Finley
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)
Willy Decker (director)

Korngold is hardly an obscure composer: his wonderful, swashbuckling Hollywood film scores virtually defined the genre. And this is hardly an obscure work: the third opera of a child prodigy aged just 23, it was a major hit in the German world in the 1920s, and its beautiful soprano 'lute song' is one of the 20th century's most-recorded arias. So how come this is the UK stage premiere?

As with Korngold's music, what seems easy on the surface contains a lot of complex detail, but reasons might include the following. 1. Banned by the Nazis as Jew's work, the opera never re-established itself in the 20th-century repertoire. 2. The symbol-saturated Freudian dream sequence that makes up most of it clearly appealed to jazz-age audiences as psychologically daring and cutting-edge, but looks corny now. 3. The two principal roles are murderously tiring to sing, the operatic equivalent of Everest without oxygen. 4. For some the music falls between two stools, neither explosively modernist nor lyrically old-fashioned, a sort of Strauss-'n'-Puccini smoothie.

The list goes on. 5. The plot is heavy-handed (Paul is mired in grief for his young dead wife Marie; he spends all the opera having nightmares in which the past - Marie - tries to prevent him from moving on to the future - Marietta, a lookalike dancer he's met; he wakes up, and leaves Bruges with his chum Frank). 6. The Film Thing ('Maybe, Mr Korngold, you should just stick to movie scores, where Errol Flynn can dash around Sherwood Forest to your widescreen gestures and technicolour orchestration?') 7. And what's wrong with Bruges, the 'dead city' of the title? To must of us it's a benignly twee place where you can trough up on chocolate, chips and beer, and claim to be exploring local culture...

There's truth in much of that. But when the opera was staged at last in Britain on Tuesday 27 January 2009, we had the chance to see it with open minds and ears. And, actually, a lot of it is qualified good news. American tenor Stephen Gould was often vocally strained and his Paul came over as someone as likeable as a Sunday morning hangover, but he coped very well with this unimaginably challenging role. Nadja Michael, as Marie/Marietta, often struggled against Korngold's jumbo-jet orchestra (so big it even spills out into the boxes); her high notes could occasionally grate parmesan, and she had her work cut out to be plausible as a dancing vixen - but again, this is a mightily difficult role. We are praising with faint damns. Over in the comfort zone, Canadian baritone Gerald Finley was in lovely voice, especially in the opera's 'other' aria the Pierrot-lied, and Kathleen Wilkinson's housekeeper drew good applause.

A big pluses is Willy Decker's faithful staging. All that night-terror symbolism of nuns, crucifixions, white-suited cabaret singers, skulls and Pierrots - not forgetting weirdo strangulations with dead wife's hair - could easily look plain stupid, now that those once-shocking symbols have been degraded through decades of sketch-show comedy, but it just about works. Particularly neat is the double-stage device for showing Paul's dream.

The winner is the music: gorgeous, full of gesture, richly orchestrated, highly expressive if not always hummable, endlessly inventive. Not quite the intricate cohesion of a Wagner score, but there's palpable structure and purpose here that shows Korngold wasn't just a blustering movie decorator.

This opera comes with caveats. The overall audience reaction heard over interval and post-opera drink was 'in two minds'. (At least that's 50 per cent more favourable than most of the 20th century's.) It can be heavy going, and asks a lot of mere humans. But if you love the sound of Korngold's film scores and want to see how he applied it to an ambitious stage drama, this makes for a fascinating evening. It's flawed, yes - what opera isn't - but there's more than enough good stuff here to make you wonder why it's been off the UK radar so long.

Rob Ainsley