In cutting its summer season to two operas and two venues, Welsh National Opera is manifestly playing with fire. So it is ironic that one of its make-weight concert performances is a new piece about coal. Errollyn Wallen's oratorio Carbon 12 - styled a choral symphony - is a paean both to coal and to the South Wales people whose landscape and lives it fashioned.
In many ways, this commission risked being one big cliche, but John Binias' libretto manages to avoid excesses of misplaced nostalgia with the broad sweep of his narrative. Using geological time as well as a shifting present, Binias makes an archetypal, death-defying hero of the miner, John Jones, who thirsts for knowledge more than for beer, hence his nickname, Jones the Bookcase. Jason Howard invests him with a credible passion and nobility, while Alwyn Mellor's portrayal of his wife, Bronwen, has dramatic force. The central action, a mock trial where John accuses coal of abusing innocents and Bronwen defends it as the beneficent provider, captures well the ambivalence of successive generations. Finally, it is with the recognition that in life opposites can and do co-exist that they are reconciled with each other and with history. Wallen's 50-minute score deployed the massive community forces with flair and brought a natural fluency to the music, even if it didn't always rise to the glinting starriness of prime anthracite.
Prokofiev's cantata Alexander Nevsky was a good foil for the Wallen: WNO were in stirring form and Albanian mezzo Enkelejda Shkosa's lament for the fallen had a truly lustrous tone. In these, and in the previous evening's Rossini cantatas where Barry Banks towered metaphorically, Carlo Rizzi conducted with total conviction. Whether their sum is equal to opera is quite another matter.
· At Birmingham Hippodrome on Thursday. Box office: 0844 338 5000.
