The Royal Opera is mis-quoting my original review of its co-production with the Salzburg Easter Festival of Pelléas et Mélisandein its ads for the Covent Garden run. “A catwalk opera (The Sunday Times),” proclaims the promotional blurb, but what I actually wrote was: “This is catwalk opera, dramatically null and meaning-less.” It is a bit alarming that the RO management thinks that referring to Debussy’s profound and serious masterpiece as such is a recommendation, but meanwhile my apologies to any Kate or Naomi fans who might have gone along expecting a fashion show.

It is conceivable, I suppose, that supermodels might pass muster in Raoul Fernandez’s absurd, does-my-bum-look-big-in-this, Pierrot costumes, but apart from George Longworth as Golaud’s young son, Yniold, none of the RO cast is flattered by them, and only Simon Keenlyside’s athletic and agile Pelléas manages to make you forget how ridiculous he looks. His adult relatives look like stuffed mannequins, understand-ably depressed at having to wear such preposterous fancy dress. In Richard Jones’s unforgettable production for Opera North and English National Opera, Yniold was the tragic focus of a harrowing psychodrama about a dysfunc-tional family; here he is a cheeky little chappie in a slightly poncy party frock.

Nobody expects to see Pelléas et Mélisande today in the neo-medieval, preRaphaelite settings envisaged by Maurice Maeterlinck, the author of the symbolist play on which it is based. But Stanislas Nordey’s production, in lifestyle-mag and abstract-art settings by Emmanuel Clolus, doesn’t begin to delve beneath the subtext of Debussy’s reduction of Maeterlinck’s play, or to reveal the mysteries of the psychology and drama. Debussy’s masterpiece is shrouded in a dreamlike ambiguity, so scenic literalism is unhelpful, but Nordey and his team substitute big, glitzy promo-visuals like a glossy advertising spread. You care for the characters as much as you might about models in a photo shoot. Debussy’s drama moves for much of the evening at a leisurely pace, but I can’t remember ever being as unengaged by the misfortunes of the house of Allemonde – the mythical kingdom ruled by Pelléas’s family – as I was at Monday night’s performance.

Nordey botches the isolated moments of high drama: Pelléas’s emergence from the castle’s vaults into the sunlit open air; Golaud’s terrifying fit of jealousy and violence when he drags Mélisande by her hair and invokes the name of King David’s faithless son, Absa-lom; and Pelléas’s impassioned declaration of love followed by his murder at his half-brother’s hands. These great histrionic confrontations go for nothing.

Nordey’s failure is all the more lamentable in that he had at his disposal an outstanding cast and a conductor, Simon Rattle, whose interpretation of Debussy’s score ranks alongside those of his great predecessors at Covent Garden – Pierre Boulez, Colin Davis and Claudio Abbado. Rattle gets ravishingly subtle, luminous and impassioned playing from Antonio Pappano’s orchestra. He dares extremes of pianissimo in the score’s twilit pages and almost Wagnerian opulence in the great orchestral climax. It is hard to imagine a superior account of this music anywhere else today.

The principal singers, too, could hardly be bettered, even though none of them is French. Keenlyside’s Pelléas is a classic, triumphing over his ludicrous Liberace-meets-Coco-the-Clown outfit with singing of rapt beauty and the physical grace of a dancer. Gerald Finley suggests he could be a great Golaud in a serious staging. Canadian-born, he has near-immaculate French and his darker, bass-baritonal timbre contrasts well with the more lyrical-sounding Keenlyside. Mélisande proves to be one of Angelika Kirchschlager’s most congenial roles, even though she has to play the part as a slightly dotty scarlet woman experiencing a very bad hair day. And young master Longworth wins allhearts as Yniold with his keen, fresh treble voice and natural charm.

After such a vacuous and pretentious evening in the theatre, it’s a relief to recall Opera North’s new production of Katya Kabanova, intelligently and meticulously directed by Tim Albery, which both places theatrical values at a premium and underlines the same ensemble ethos that bagged the Leeds-based company the Royal Philharmonic Society’s opera award for Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Janacek’s domestic tragedy is a tautly argued social drama about a woman longing for freedom from a loveless marriage and the strict regime of a tyrannical mother-in-law in rural Russia. Opera North play it without an intermission and achieve an inexorable momentum, thanks to Albery’s directorial clarity, the simplicity and mobility of Hildegard Bechtler’s atmospheric sets and Richard Farnes’s exciting conducting. The company’s “ensemble” casting means that Giselle Allen, the Ellen Orford of the award-winning Peter Grimes, returns to give a gleaming, soaring account of Katya’s poignant music. Sally Burgess’s unforgiving, self-righteous Kaban-icha is all the more effective for being underplayed: she is a conniving control freak rather than the usual witchlike monster. Wendy Dawn Thompson shines as Varvara. Opera North redeems itself for its grisly Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the beginning of the year with this gripping Katya.

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