Cork's music lovers have had their hearts set on a home-grown opera company for quite some time now. The city's current term as European Capital of Culture concentrated minds, and Opera 2005 launched its inaugural production over the weekend: Mozart's Figaro's Wedding, performed in English in Jeremy Sams' translation. The company's Belfast-born artistic director, Kevin Mallon, conducted an orchestra drawn from mainly local musicians who played with an effervescent touch.

Soutra Gilmore's asymmetric designs and the lozenge-coloured background screens created by lighting designer Paul Denby were sleek and stylish, but cold. An illuminated grid projected onto the slanting walls of the set aptly suggested a chessboard and later transformed into the pink tiles of the Countess's bathroom. But the sterile expanse of the bare raked stage put pressure on the performers to provide all the drama. Servants and masters, dressed in black and white alike, lacked a social or historical context, and the result was an emotional vacuum.

Michael Hunt's direction squeezed as much broad comedy as possible from the plot's series of deceptions and misunderstandings. In particular, Figaro (Ewan Taylor) and Suzanna (Sandra Oman) opted for comic exaggeration and over-emoting. Only occasionally, in the performances of Riccardo Simonetti as the Count and Ann-Helen Moen as his wife, did we sense the yearning and melancholy woven into Mozart and Da Ponte's work.

Simonetti had the fullness of tone to carry the role of the Count, providing the most memorable thrills of the night. But not one of the singers was helped by the mismatch between pit and stage: the time lag between them, like the delay on a long-distance phone call, suggested that the cast couldn't to hear the orchestra properly. They didn't know what they were missing.