Martha Jones and Jessica Cale | Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The new regime is now properly up and running at English Touring Opera, with Robin Norton-Hale as general director – but the repertoire so far looks not too different, with the opening stroke of her new broom fitting right into the baroque groove established by James Conway is his transformative 20-year overlordship.

But we’ve never heard a sound like this – well, anyway not since about 1960. Conductor Yshani Perinpanayagam, detailed to produce a new edition, has come up with something rather marvellous, the sort of thing Eugene Goossens worked up for Beecham’s famous Messiah, or that Respighi kitted out his Ancient Airs in. Well! I didn’t know what to enjoy more: the harps, choral woodwind and variety of orchestral colour, or the thought of all the early-musicos having infarctions as the mimsy world of 'Historically Informed Performance' was blown away before our ears.

Good for Ms P, and good for ETO… up to a point. The orchestration sometimes gets a bit thick and muddy, but it’s sensible to employ the whole orchestra that will be playing Rossini’s Cenerentola, which accompanies Poppea on tour. Poppea is a long show, with much chatty recitative, and a bit of aural relief from the usual austerity of continuo and a few violins won’t go amiss as the show proceeds around the country. And to be frank it’s one of the saviours of a peculiarly mixed show, whose pedestrian progress (basically, sluggish conducting), not wholly first-rate cast and misjudged new translation take the gloss off what could have been a pretty fab evening.

Ms Norton-Hale herself directs, her ETO debut. And it’s a solid performance, though doesn’t have much to say about its characters beyond the fact that they’re all fatally compromised: Seneca is pompous (but right), Nero an unstable voluptuary, Poppea a determined, Route-One schemer but strangely unreadable, and poor old Ottone (the only honourable one of the lot) is such a weed it’s of no consequence.

Cast of Poppea | Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The setting is an attractive, abstract two-level stage with hints of constructivist geometry, atmospherically and inventively lit by Charlie Morgan Jones. Gods watch the action from above, occasionally coming down to lend a hand (dictated more by the necessities of role-doubling than actual dramatic relevance). One thing succeeds another, with too little genuine expression in much of the singing, and without really persuading us that there is much here to get involved in. This is the biggest pitfall with Poppea: it helps to be reminded that these psychos, particularly if they are a bit funny, also happen to rule the world – with exactly the same terrifying frivolity they do everything else. Otherwise it’s just a soap opera about freaks.

But there is an attractive hypnotic quality (a question of design as well as pacing) that draws you in. There is something glacial about Jessica Cale’s Poppea, but very watchable, and Martha Jones’s androgyne Nero has the right air of barely-controlled oddness. Kezia Bienek is the forceful Ottavia, rolling her eyes in approved 21^st-century fashion as Seneca drones on – but he, in Trevor Eliot Bowes’s sturdy performance, really becomes the moral rock – possibly because the great Valetto take-down scene is cut, one of several regrettable decisions that wouldn’t have been necessary if things moved a bit faster. Actually the dramatic star is Amy J Payne as the nurse Arnalta, showing just how to bring character and depth to singing without moving a muscle, as with her beguiling lullaby as Poppea sleeps.

Martha Jones and Jessica Cale | Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

The big minuses of the evening are Feargal Mostyn-Williams’s Otton, which was really off colour, and the new translation, with tone-deaf attempts to be demotic, and almost completely unscanned to the music, with false accents, rushed syllables, and a strong sense that the writer at no point actually consulted the score. It’s not bad, but it had the ingredients to be much better.