Seasoned opera audiences may have been clamouring to see the WNO's opera-for-beginners show Chorus! - as a publicity leaflet told us - at other venues on the company's autumn tour, but they sure as hell weren't clamouring here. There were rows of empty seats throughout the auditorium for its Wednesday night airing at the New Theatre, demonstrating a contemptuous disregard, I would suggest, for what must seem like Classic FM-style programming. In fact, the show proved less opera-lite than might have been feared. True, this 400-year trawl through the repertoire included such obvious hits as Va, pensiero from Verdi's Nabucco, and the Humming Chorus from Puccini's Madama Butterfly. But there were also rarer items including - at the start and close of the evening - a martial, flag-waving Armies from 12 European Lands from Prokofiev's War and Peace and a rollicking Make Our Garden Grow from Bernstein's Candide.

An excerpt from another 20th-century opera, Ave Maria from Poulenc's Les dialogues des Carmlites reminded one of nights of true greatness with WNO, such as the 1999 production of this tremendous work. Saturday's sold-out performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde was another such night. This was a welcome revival of a co-production with Scottish Opera, last seen (indeed, first seen) in Oxford in 1993, when Anne Evans and Jeffrey Lawton sang the roles of the doomed lovers under conductor Sir Charles Mackerras. The parts were taken scarcely less impressively this time in Yannis Kokkok's spare production (revival director Peter Watson) by the Swedish soprano Annalena Persson - seen as the self-sacrificing Senta in The Flying Dutchman from WNO earlier in the year - and Canadian tenor John Mac Master. With the mighty forces that Wagner's score demands, however, there were times when the singers - Mac Master in particular - found themselves in unequal combat with the orchestra. Conductor Mark Wriggleworth might usefully have encouraged the greater restraint necessary in a theatre that lacks an orchestra pit. Susan Bickley was a first-class Brangne, whose disobedience over the love potion sets her mistress and the heroic Tristan inexorably on the road to ruin. Stepping in at short notice for an indisposed Alfred Reiter, bass Paul Hodges sang superbly as King Marke, the mighty monarch destined to suffer almost as much through his favourite knight's treachery.

Friday saw another full house at the theatre for the ever-welcome return of the company's production of Puccini's La bohme, which Oxford audiences have now been seeing over 22 years. This time we were offered a splendid, almost all-Welsh cast, including Gwyn Hughes Jones as Rodolfo, Jason Howard as Marcello and Rebecca Evans in her debut season singing the doomed Mimi.