Welsh National Opera's first performance in its new home could so easily have been a disaster. But nowhere was the return of its former musical director Carlo Rizzi more crucial than in this revival, as he transformed the shoddy Traviata of last May into an emphatic restatement of the musical values that have traditionally been at the core of the WNO. Rizzi conducted with authority and passion, and with such care for his singers that where terminal decline had beckoned, he seemed to have effected a miracle cure.

Nuccia Focile's magnificent Violetta had been the saving grace of the original. This time properly supported, she could give her awesome best: she was innately expressive, with every note sung from the heart. The warmth and compassion of Jonathan Summers' Giorgio Germont also helped make the final scene, where Violetta's tragedy is balanced by the redemptive element of the love she has given and engendered, most moving.

Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser's production is, however, irredeemable. Its crass updating of the opera to a contemporary setting - in which a supermodel Violetta is feted by a coterie of parasitic partygoers and where her wimpish lover, Alfredo, must sing his big second act aria into a mobile phone - makes a nonsense of the Dumas story and of Verdi's music. As Violetta lies dying in her hospital bed, hooked to an intravenous line and compelled to clutch the drip stand as she rallies temporarily, her illness remains undefined. The only evidence of consumptive coughing came from the audience, and this was heard rather too clearly for comfort thanks to the Millennium Centre's fine acoustics. Overall, though, the prognosis for the company can only be good. That the auditorium permits wonderful nuances of colour to be heard from the orchestra pit is surely the best prospect of all.