The Cape Town Opera’s first ever visit to the UK has caused waves. Bringing Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was perhaps an obvious choice, but a production that transports the action to the townships of Soweto adds a contemporary twist and the opening performances of the tour in Cardiff last week are said to have swept audiences off their feet.

Xolela Sixaba and Lisa Daltirus

Some of this translated to the semi-staged concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall on Monday, but not all. Various attempts have been made to get opera to work in the hall since its refurbishment – with limited success. Placing the singers behind the orchestra is never helpful and it was a measure of the strength of Cape Town Opera’s cast that they made such a good fist of it. Even so, at least half the words were inaudible and one was left with the sense that a vibrant and passionate performance of the opera was going on, but tantalisingly out of reach.

What made it all worthwhile was the voices. Any performance that opens with “Summertime” sung as beautifully and strongly as Pretty Yende did here is off to a good start. This young soprano is a name to watch. Porgy and Bess themselves – Xolela Sixaba and Lisa Daltirus – inhabited their roles with 110 per cent of the voice and personality Gershwin calls for, Daltirus surely an important lyric-dramatic soprano in the making and Sixaba with authority to spare. Victor Ryan Robertson made a vivacious Sportin’ Life; Ntobeko Rwanqa was a sturdy Crown, though he never really sent shivers down the spine; and even some of the solo singers who stepped out of the ranks of the company’s lusty chorus fielded voices to note.

Just as the Mariinsky Opera became a cradle for young singers after the fall of the Iron Curtain, so it is possible to imagine Cape Town as the next stop on the operatic talent spotter’s itinerary.

The orchestra, made up of British players, sounded less than happy strung out across the front of the Royal Festival Hall stage, with the small acting platform in the middle, but David Charles Abell paced the evening skilfully. Lucky Cardiff, getting the fully staged production, and Edinburgh, where it now travels.

The production will be performed on Friday and Saturday at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre,