With the first night of Welsh National Opera's new production of Wozzeck on Saturday, the final block in the edifice of Cardiff's £106m arts complex fell into place. The Wales Millennium Centre, which dominates a thriving business and leisure development at the seafront, is bright, spacious and flawlessly egalitarian. Covered by a bronze shell, clad in Welsh slate and commanding the eye with a massive inscription that reads "In these stones horizons sing", the building has succeeded since its official opening in November to be all things to all men.
The Wales Millennium Centre is symptomatic of public attitudes to the arts in the UK today. No politician will admit that it amounts, in all but name, to a state-of-the-art opera house because opera is a vote-loser and the new building is not intended as a place where artists communicate their message to an interested public. No, its purpose is to serve as a democratically accountable entertainment emporium. Its very size - with 1,750 seats, far larger than most of Europe's municipal opera houses, never mind provincial British theatres - condemns it in perpetuity to be a glorified receiving house, pandering to popular taste rather than fostering an internationally recognisable nexus of local ensembles. That's why it is so politically correct: it pays lip service to culture, under the guise of a showcase public building, instead of embodying the sort of sustained arms-length patronage that results in artistic fertility.
In its opening season, the Wales Millennium Centre hosts just 17 performances by its "resident" opera company compared with 62 of imported commercial musicals. Next season WNO raises its tally to 25, The Merry Widow with Lesley Garrett providing the main attraction. Bargain seat-prices should help to expand the audience base in the first year or so but, in the longer term, WNO has a fight on its hands to fill a large theatre without diluting its product.
With numerous public figures in the audience, WNO was wise to debut at its new home with a tried and tested La traviata on Friday, 24 hours before unveiling Wozzeck. But Berg's opera is the jewel in the spring season: it sounds well in the new auditorium, a wide horseshoe with plentiful stalls space, perfect sight-lines and warm, clay-coloured decor. Richard Jones's anti-expressionist staging, designed by Paul Steinberg, Buki Schiff and Franck Evin, is a co- production with Berlin's Komische Oper, where it was first seen last year. WNO fields a new cast and conductor - and it is Vladimir Jurowski and the orchestra who make the biggest impression, playing down the modernity of the music in favour of its glistening Debussyan colours, its saturated Mahlerian swathes and chamber-operatic intimacy. In Jurowski's hands Wozzeck sounds incredibly beautiful - and would have been even more so without amplification of instrumental parts in Act 2.
Jones updates the story to the early television age, demilitarises it (Wozzeck is a guinea-pig for a tinned food manufacturer) and characterises it, with loud irony, as an indictment of the modern industrial/corporate machine, which robs its adherents of soul, imagination and sensitivity. Paradoxically, cast and chorus bring tremendous individuality to their parts, led by Christopher Purves's richly resonant Wozzeck, Grun-Brit Barkmin's lusty Marie and Peter Svensson's golf-playing Drum Major.
