Gordon Brown may have blown it, but the Royal Opera House still has The Sun on its side. After last year’s experiment Covent Garden was again packed with that newspaper’s readers on Saturday. I can’t tell you how many will be voting Tory, but to judge from the gasps when Don José’s dagger plunged into Carmen, and the cheers at the finish, a lot of these first-timers will be voting for more opera — although they are in for a shock if they think that top-price seats at the Royal Opera always cost £30.

They certainly had their money’s worth of vocal and visual thrills here, even if Francesca Zambello’s conventional staging (first seen in 2006) doesn’t exactly offer radical new insights into Bizet’s femme fatale. You could cast several productions of Oliver! from the ranks of grinning urchins. Then there are the knicker-flashing flamenco dancers, macho toreadors, muscley matadors, prancing picadors and assorted who-knows-whatadors. It’s a pity that Tommy Steele’s little white bull doesn’t make the parade, but the assembled livestock does include several chickens, a donkey and a black stallion on which Escamillo enters. He’s a good actor, too. The horse, I mean.

It says much for Elina Garanca’s Carmen that, even when competing with this menagerie, she dominates every scene. It helps that the young Latvian looks stunning. Here’s one Carmen whose ability to reduce strong men to jelly is totally credible. But she also commands a voice that’s rich and vibrant from lowest note to highest, and capable of hurling out a contemptuous challenge with blazing power. What she lacks is a streak of earthy wildness. She bumps and grinds her Habanera sexily enough, but you never quite feel that there’s a tiger inside this cool, controlled and rather modern miss.

I liked Roberto Alagna’s Don José, though. It’s fashionable now to play the susceptible corporal as a jealous psychopath, unable to control his anger. Alagna, more interestingly, portrays him as a besotted weakling, gradually but comprehensively broken by Carmen. Although his voice sometimes sounds wayward, there’s no denying the tremendous anguish in his singing.

Ildebrando D’Arcangelo swaggers effectively enough as Escamillo, though his Toreador’s Song doesn’t pack much punch; perhaps the horse should have sung it. But there’s a lovely, silver-toned Micaëla from Liping Zhang and a delightful Frasquita and Mercédès from Eri Nakamura and Louise Innes. Bertrand de Billy’s conducting is mixed — searing orchestral nuances, limp chorus singing — and some ensembles need tightening.

Box office: 020-7304 4000. To Oct 24

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