Here is a recipe for chutzpah: commission an opera from an operatic ingénu, perform it in a language that is foreign to the commissioning companies’ audiences and throw a ton of money at it. What do you get? Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna is neither a flop nor a waste of money. It’s a camp, endearingly sentimental homage to the art of the diva.

Jonathan Summers with Janis Kelly in the title role

Few opera-goers will have heard of the American-Canadian singer-songwriter. Few among Wainwright’s legion of fans can have been to the opera. But the 35-year-old purveyor of “baroque pop” has been in love with the lyric theatre ever since he heard the sound of Gigli on his mother’s gramophone. (For the uninitiated, Wainwright is the son of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III.)

Wainwright is a born melodist – not a quality modern opera is over-endowed with. He has also, in his Judy Garland tribute, shown a flair for the theatrical. When the second Manchester International Festival was looking for an operatic commission with a difference, who better to prise the artform from the clutches of its own conventions?

The trouble with Prima Donna is that it is entirely in thrall to those conventions, because it is an opera about opera – its diva worship, its inflated egos, its heightened emotions. The atmosphere is so insidiously reverential that you begin to wonder whether Wainwright might be sending up everything opera stands for.

It is tailor-made for a wider public – or indeed anyone who sees opera as a flamboyant caricature of life and love. Set in Paris in 1970, Prima Donna traces the struggle of “the world’s most acclaimed soprano” to make a comeback after an unexplained hiatus in her career. The action occurs in her apartment, where she is bullied and romanced and seduced by former triumphs.

Cast in two acts and sung in French (co-librettist: Bernadette Colomine), Prima Donna has a classical shape, the story unfolding within a single day. The music is a mixture of sweet romanticism (Catalani, Poulenc) and minimalism. There is one recurring fragment of a “hit” tune, a couple of solo scenas for the heroine, a dash of comic coloratura for her maid, and a surfeit of arpeggiated chords, all paced at an unvarying lento.

So far, so familiar. But the acid test is: would I want to hear Prima Donna again? My answer has to be yes, though how far that judgment is swayed by Daniel Kramer’s superb staging, handsomely designed by Antony McDonald, is hard to tell. In the Callas-like title role Janis Kelly gives the performance of her life, with equally inspired support from Jonathan Summers, William Joyner and Rebecca Bottone. The Orchestra of Opera North is conducted by Pierre-André Valade.

The festival’s other classical coup is to marry architect Zaha Hadid to the music of Bach. The test here is: does Hadid’s acoustic shell militate against or enhance the musical experience? Her panelled white ribbon, swirling and unfurling round an otherwise featureless installation space at Manchester Art Gallery, is certainly appealing to the eye. More importantly, she has transformed a low-ceilinged, audibly air-conditioned room into an intimate sound-box.

Jean-Guihen Queyras, who played four of Bach’s cello suites, evidently liked it too. The concept is transportable. Could this be the solution to all those dreadful modern concert halls that destroy sound?

‘Prima Donna’ will be performed at Sadler’s Wells, London, in April 2010
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