What a delightful surprise it was last week, as the action began in Welsh National Opera’s revival of its sun-drenched sixties-style 2003 production of The Elixir of Love, to find the cast singing in Italian. When last given at Milton Keynes six years ago, the opera was in an English version by David Parry. As a consequence, listeners were robbed of much aural pleasure – bel canto, in a language so ill-suited to it? – with no compensatory gain in understanding, indeed rather the opposite, since there were no surtitles.

Sounding as it should, Donizetti’s most joyful comic romp, a feast of melody from start to finish, hugely entertained a packed house. Substitute singers in two of the major roles were far from being a handicap to success, since these were sweet-voiced tenor Robin Tritschler as the love-lorn Nemorino and WNO’s long-time favourite baritone Donald Maxwell as the quack doctor Dulcamara.

Tritschler’s heart-tugging account of the opera’s most justly famous aria, the gorgeous Una furtiva lagrima, was the high-spot of the evening, while Maxwell dominated the action with his richly comic portrayal of gleeful fraudulence from the moment of his arrival in the basket of a hot-air balloon.

Soprano Camilla Roberts sang powerfully as the village beauty Adina who dismisses the ardent wooing of Nemorino in favour of the demands of strutting Captain Belcore (Simon Thorpe). All changes, however, when the ‘loser’ wins all other female hearts – not, as he thinks, because of Dulcamara’s love potion (supposed) but because they have found out (as he hasn’t) that he is now the richest man in the area.

In total contrast, the previous evening’s revival of André Engel’s 1988 production of Richard Strauss’s one-act masterpiece Salome was a sombre and emotionally draining presentation of obsessive, misdirected love. The work remains as shocking today, in the vile-blood lust of its title character, as it was when first heard more than a century ago. Rarely has an opera’s music been more closely matched to content, in 100 minutes of mounting tension that builds towards the shattering climax of the crazed princess (the brilliant Erika Sunnegardh) writhing in necrophiliac passion beside the severed head of John the Baptist (Michael Druiett, another successful last-minute substitution).

Other fine performances were offered by Peter Hoare as Herod and Sally Burgess (pictured) as his wife, Salome’s mother Herodias. As in Elixir, the orchestra (conducted by Andrew Greenwood) was on tremendous form.