English Touring Opera patrons around the country - and this valiant low-budget company tours farther and wider than any other British-based operatic outfit - are now better served in the matter of new productions than opera-lovers on the Welsh National Opera or Scottish Opera circuits. The Scots can expect a diet of only four main-house productions for the fore-seeable future, while the once proud Welsh can muster only two brand-new mises en scène at their swanky Wales Millennium Centre home in 2008.

ETO is doing five new productions this year, and travelling the length of the land. The spring itinerary takes Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Mozart’s Don Giovanni from Truro, in Cornwall, to Perth, in Scotland, via 12 other towns and cities, although some stops will miss out on Susannah. For the autumn, a chamber version of Dvorak’s Rusalka and Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen, a compact reduction of Bizet’s masterpiece, have been announced.

For a company on limited budgets, this is an ambitious programme: Donizetti’s tragedy of Henry VIII’s doomed queen, a well-timed revival to coincide with The Other Boleyn Girl fever in cinemas, has not toured the regions in my opera-going lifetime, while Floyd’s Appalachian transfer of the Apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders is a UK professional stage premiere.

Anyone familiar with ETO’s recent work will know what to expect of the spring offerings: minimalist sets, a clear, narrative, “no frills, no agendas” production style and good-to-excellent singers, both young and experienced. The tour opened, as ever, at the Hackney Empire last weekend, and musical standards seem to improve with every visit to this charming, welcoming theatre, thanks to the conductors Michael Rosewell, Michael Lloyd and Alexander Ingram, who get playing of remarkable quality, in scores with very different stylistic requirements, from a 45-strong “scratch” orchestra.

Few companies outside the international mainstream would venture a singers’ opera such as Anna Bolena, one traditionally associated with the great bel canto divas Maria Callas, Renata Scotto and Joan Sutherland, but ETO, using the original Italian, has cast it more than creditably, with Julie Unwin’s feisty, if somewhat phlegmatic, Anna sailing through the difficulties of the role without serious mishap. Unwin doesn’t command the tigress temperament to stop you in your tracks when the doomed queen makes her defiant defence, “Giudici, ad Anna, giudici!” (Judges! Anna’s judges!), but she is affecting in the reflective section of her final mad scene and makes a brave stab at the heroine’s dramatic vocal flourishes.

Two young newcomers threaten to outshine her, but, thanks to Donizetti, don’t quite. As Giovanna (Jane) Seymour, the tall, handsome Julia Riley has a voice of huge potential if she is careful not to oversing too soon, while the young, Guildhall-trained Brazilian tenor Luciano Botelho, as Percy, could soon have an international career, with his easily produced Latin lyricism, if he sortsout some snatched and pinched-sounding high notes. Serena Kay’s passionate Smeaton - the musician who was tortured into admitting adultery with the queen and beheaded with her other alleged lovers - gives good value.

Visually, there is less to admire: James Conway’s workaday staging, in skeletal sets by Soutra Gilmour, suggests a visit to Madame Tussauds when the waxworks are doing a walkabout, and the costumes for the women look ungainly and ill-fitting (except on Riley).

Essentially using the same scenic framework, with the outline of a rural American barn replacing Lady and the Unicorn-style tapestries, Conway makes a more effective case for Floyd’s little moral shocker, written in the 1950s, partly as a response to the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the USA. The lissom Susannah Polk is espied bathing naked in the woods by slavering old men. They denounce her to the local preacher, Olin Blitch, who promises to defend her in church in a exchange for a bit of nooky on the sly.

Floyd’s idiom is sub-Puccinian, American-folksy, but he tells this tale of religious bigotry, self-righteousness and hypocrisy with unerring dramatic momentum and writes grateful vocal lines for the principals. This is an American opera with wings, especially in small theatres, and ETO makes it work, both musically and theatrically. If Donna Bateman’s words were at all intelligible, she would be an immaculate Susannah, but she touches the heart with the fervour of her singing.

Andrew Slater’s Blitch has clearer diction, and he presents a figure of contemptible moral weakness rather than outright villainy. Todd Wilander and Sean Clayton are good in the contrasting tenor roles of Sam Polk and Little Bat McLean, Susannah’s vengeful brother and bashful best friend.

By far the most involving of ETO’s operatic spring triptych is Jonathan Munby’s smart, modern-dress staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (an abridged version of the Prague text). This is the best-looking of the three, with trellised screens flanking a grandiose double door, brilliantly back-lit by Guy Hoare so that characters can be seen “off stage” in silhouette. Munby seems uninhibited by Don Giovanni’s reputation as a director’s graveyard of an opera, and the black comedy emerges naturally, as in a spoken play, but with due significance given to the religious subtext of the piece. For once, the Commendatore arrives for his supper appointment as a statue and it’s not remotely embarrassing. Here is a director who clearly trusts the music and text, and gets fine nonoperatic acting from his young cast. Roland Wood’s beefy Don lacks elegance, but is well matched with Jonathan Gunthorpe’s sturdy, truculent Leporello. Slater is an imposing Commendatore and, among the antihero’s female prey, the Russian soprano Ilona Domnich is a sweet-toned, knowing Zerlina, and the Swedish soprano Julia Sporsen makes Donna Anna an avenging fury, with steely tone and menacing coloratura.

Anyone seeing their first Don Giovanni will recognise ETO’s production as Mozart’s masterpiece. In small theatres, it will pack a powerful punch.

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