If you didn’t know something odd was going on at the Royal Opera House, the big red open-top bus parked outside and plastered with the logo of the nation’s top-selling newspaper might have given you a clue. Apart from a few toffee-nosed opera critics, yours truly included, every member of the audience for this show — the opening night of the Royal Opera’s new season — was supposedly a reader of The Sun.

That, at least, was the intention of the year’s most audacious, and certainly most controversial, marketing wheeze — by which tickets vastly subsidised by the Hamlyn Trust were offered for sale only through that one newspaper’s website. “It was The Sun wot found you,” quipped Tony Hall, Covent Garden’s chief executive, in a pre-performance speech.

Looking round, however, I can’t say that I detected any vast seismic shift in the social, ethnic or generational mix of the audience. In the Floral Hall, predominantly white, well-dressed, middle-aged people quaffed bubbly, just like normal.

What was noticeably different was the reaction to the performance itself. Although The Sun had prepared its readers with its own inimitable introduction to the world of Mozart (“dirtier than Amy Winehouse’s beehive, riper than a full-on effing rant by Gordon Ramsay and more violent than a Tarantino bloodfest”), the prolonged laughs triggered by the black ironies of Da Ponte’s libretto and the audible gasps at the heartless misogyny of Giovanni himself suggested an audience utterly gripped by its first encounter with this darkest of 18th-century operas.

That was encouraging. But if there were 2,000 operatic virgins in Covent Garden last night, I wish they had heard more of the world-class singing for which the place is famed. Until his final encounter with Eric Halfvarson’s staunch Commendatore (when Francesca Zambello’s mundane 2002 staging finally caught fire, in every sense), Simon Keenlyside did not muster either the vocal weight or enough demonic spirit to convince as Giovanni. Impish charm and a hunky torso aren’t quite enough. And there was disappointingly lacklustre singing from Miah Persson (Zerlina) and an ailing Marina Poplavskaya (Anna) too.

Kyle Ketelsen played Leporello mostly for cheap laughs and Ramón Vargas sounded as stolid as he looked as Ottavio. Only the Elvira of the irrepressible Joyce DiDonato matched the energy that Sir Charles Mackerras generated from the orchestra.

That was a pity. Some 113 cinemas in Britain and Europe took a live relay of last night’s performance. It wasn’t a bad advertisement for grand opera. But riper than a full-on effing rant by Gordon Ramsay? I’m afraid not.

Box office: 020-7304 4000

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010