I blame it on her silly pink high heels. Halfway through Act I of this Royal Opera Rossini revival, Joyce DiDonato, singing Rosina, slipped and twisted her leg. A fractured fibula was later diagnosed.

Quite apart from the pain, she picked entirely the wrong production to hobble through. In the Act I finale of this Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier staging, the claustrophobic set in which all the characters are squabbling suddenly rises into the air and starts rocking violently, like a cross-channel ferry caught in a gale. As DiDonato gamely clung on, one feared that a rare SOS — “prima donna overboard!” — would have to be sent to the Metropolitan Police.

But the American mezzo is a tough trouper. Although an NHS crutch played an incongruously large part in Act II, she sang to the end, her scintillating coloratura apparently unaffected, and won the night’s biggest laugh when she delivered the suddenly apt line: “I have cramp in my foot.”

The incident added some real drama to a staging which, though genial enough, doesn’t exactly dazzle with wit or invention. Indeed, it was at its most theatrically powerful (as in 2006, when it was new) when DiDonato was giving her impression of a caged tigress going crazy with sexual frustration, and reduced to hurling darts at the wall. And her unscripted accident curtailed all that.

The production’s limitations didn’t really matter, because if you heard nothing except Juan Diego Flórez’s Almaviva blaze through the final 15 minutes of Rossini’s opera you would still have had your money’s worth. Flórez is in amazing form: his runs brilliantly etched, his tone glinting, his top notes seemingly effortless. He held his brilliant final B flat without a quiver of insecurity for what seemed like half a minute.

Pity poor Pietro Spagnoli. In lesser company the Italian baritone would surely have been the star of the show, delivering Figaro’s numbers with panache and impressively meaty tone. He surely did enough on his Covent Garden debut (standing in for an indisposed Simon Keenlyside) to guarantee a swift recall.

Around him seasoned compatriots Alessandro Corbelli (a superbly comic Bartolo) and the massive bass Ferrucio Furlanetto (portraying a Basilio that was half Boris Godunov and half Boris Karloff) ensured that the prestissimo ensembles fizzed. All was impeccably held togther in the pit by the conductor Antonio Pappano, except when the set did its bizarre hokey cokey. For this stellar cast to be upstaged by the scenery must be galling.

Box office: 020-7304 4000, to July 18

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