The workвЂ™s complex sentiment вЂ“ not nearly as cutesy as first appears вЂ“ and volte face ending also set the work in a category of its own, though recent successful productions by Opera North and Opera Holland Park have helped the cause. It translates well enough, mostly audible through a semi-American drawl, in Kelley RourkeвЂ™s English version.

Many of his devotees would name it their least favourite work, perhaps uncomfortable with the US setting (characters with names like Sid and Harry singing вЂњhe-llo, he-lloвЂќ? In a Puccini opera?). This is ENOвЂ™s first staging of La fanciulla del West for 50 years, evidence that not everyone feels as enthusiastic about Minnie the gun-swinging saloon-bar owner and her community of miners, as they do about Mimi or any of PucciniвЂ™s other heroines. It made an arresting start to a compelling evening.

The Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, making her UK operatic debut and unquestionably one of the stars of the evening, hurled herself and the excellent ENO orchestra into the music while the audience was still reaching for off buttons. In a triumphant, cogent new staging for English National Opera by Richard Jones, these opening bars were performed with the curtain down but the proscenium area brilliantly illuminated, commanding attention not by darkening the house but by brightening it. Instantly we are transported to the wild west in the era of Wells Fargo and the gold-digging forty-niners whose overriding emotion is homesickness. The most luscious is the California gold rush opera, The Girl of the Golden West (1910), based on David BelascoвЂ™s play, which Puccini saw on Broadway.ДЄfter a hurricane gust across the orchestra вЂ“ in the form of a rushing upward scale almost too swift to register вЂ“ crunching chords open out into a broad, grand-landscape melody, catchy, folksy and doused with terrible nostalgia. ButterflyвЂ™s quicksilver chatter takes us straight to the heart of a sinister, unfamiliar orient. BohГЁme leaps in mid-stream, rugged, boisterous, beady.

Tosca crashes to life with fortissimo chords of fate. If Puccini was good at endings, he was even better at beginnings. Susan Bullock as Minnie вЂradiates naturalness and humanityвЂ™ in The Girl of the Golden West.

Girls of the golden west time