Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West is the only operatic western. Its unlikely location, in the California Gold Rush of 1849, has marked it out as a lightweight: it has never quite enjoyed the popularity it deserves. All that may change with this new production by Aletta Collins, with Alwyn Mellor in the title role.

Advance publicity had suggested that changes might be made that would veer away from the original, always an alarm bell where modern directors are concerned. Certainly some non-PC stereotypes have been altered. Otherwise, the ‘pure hokum’ that has characterised the cynic’s view has thankfully been consigned to oblivion.

The crunch comes in the last of its three acts, where a bloodthirsty rabble of hardened miners has to be persuaded that the bandit, Ramerrez alias Dick Johnson, already with a noose round his neck, should be pardoned in order to get off with Minnie, the golden girl and darling of them all. It’s a tough call, which falls to our heroine. But Mellor’s Minnie gets away with it, in spades.

Puccini’s score calls for a large orchestra. It is also the most adventurous he ever wrote, full of dissonance but larded with folksong and invented ‘ethnic’ tunes that chime well with the pioneering spirit of the piece. Richard Farnes, whose control of this orchestra is by now legendary, finds exactly the right blend of poetry and power. Here his greatest ally is Mellor herself.

She is able to generate Wagnerian levels of sound when the going gets heavy, so that Farnes never has to worry about balance. Here she is thrilling, not least at the top of her range which is extraordinarily resonant. Yet at more intimate moments, such as her Act 2 prayer or when she calls in her various charitable favours in the final act, she can cut back her tone with supreme restraint. This contrast is one of the sensations of the evening.

Rafael Rojas’s tenor does not carry quite same heft, but he sings with more flair than ever before on this stage, while making a sympathetic Johnson. There is genuine emotion between him and Minnie. Opposing them both is Robert Hayward’s Rance, the down-at-heel sheriff whose dander is curdled by being spurned in the love-stakes. His gradual disintegration is masterly, until he is finally reduced to a neurotic, whisky-sodden wreck.

Lesser roles are finely taken too. Bonaventura Bottone’s lively bartender, Graeme Danby’s stiff-necked Wells Fargo sleuth, Eddie Wade’s authoritative Sonora, a leading miner, Callum Thorpe and Kathryn Walker as the native American couple, all lend depth to the central trio.

Within Giles Cadle’s conventional yet atmospheric sets the men’s chorus comes into its own in the dramatic finale: we sense their individual personalities. Fanciulla doesn’t get more potent than this.

Further performances on Jan 30, Feb 8, 19 & 21, then on tour till March 21.