Not many WNO revivals have taken to the Wales Millennium Centre stage as spectacularly as the current season's production of Puccini's Turandot.

It explodes into the auditorium, urged on by side-stage amplification, a scimitar-sharp chorus and music director Lothar Koenigs, conducting the opera for the first time and relishing the opportunity to make the most of Puccini's ravishing score.

Director Christopher Alden's version, first seen at the company's former home in the New Theatre, Cardiff, seventeen years ago and reprised there in 2000, rejoices in minimalism. All the sartorial clutter associated with Turandot herself is gone, along with ancient Chinese splendours.

Instead there are the story's strange human relationships, played out in a bare arena on whose walls are hung pictures of Turandot's unsuccessful suitors. It's the production's abiding image, along with the rainbow colours of palace functionaries Ping, Pang and Pong.

In 2000 the company drafted in a big voice to play Turandot, Anna Shafajinskaia, and she returns to add to the volume if not at first the reflective subtlety of her first aria, In questa reggia. Things improve, but her combustible dramatic soprano is essential in a production stripped of inessentials. Carlo Malinverno makes his company debut as Timur.

Gwyn Hughes Jones as Calaf is in good form from the start, building to a securely delivered Nessun dorma, the set piece moderated by attractions elsewhere, such as David Stout, Philip Lloyd Holtham and Huw Llywelyn as the three colourful bureaucrats and the sublime Rebecca Evans, singing the pathetic slave girl Liu for the first time.