Today Carmen is probably the most popular opera ever written and everyone knows at least one of the tunes.

From its very beginning it is an opera that conjures up Spain in all its glory.

Yet at its Paris premiere in 1875 it was greeted with hostility. By the final curtain, at least half of audience had left, and the work was savaged in the popular press.

Three months later its composer Georges Bizet was dead at the age of just 36, a bitter young man who had gambled everything and lost. But since then the opera has gained tremendous popularity. It is put on by every opera house in the world, singers ache to take part and it is a guarantee of full houses.

It wasn't such a full house in the hangar-like Brighton Centre for the third visit of this production by Ellen Kent's Opera And Ballet International with the Chisinau National Opera of Moldova. That said, there were around a thousand people in the audience to see this tale of sexual jealousy, doomed love and murder.

Most recently seen at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, this production lost much of its intensity and its intimacy in the switch back to the Centre, which really has no acoustics whatsoever, and where the distance between the audience and the cast is so great.

Conductor Nicolae Dohogaru did his best against the awful acoustics and handled Bizet's music well, bringing out the full drama and sexiness of this work. He made the final scene where obsessed soldier Don Jose strikes down the fiery and independent gypsy girl absolutely intense.

The production did invoke heat and the dust of Spain, and while much of the dialogue and the children's chorus had been removed, Ellen Kent added the wow factor of a beautiful white Andalucian stallion.

If you like your opera more up close then the same company will be back at Brighton's Theatre Royal next June, with productions of La Boheme and Rigoletto.

Perhaps the company might also think about using the refurbished Dome, with its now fine acoustics.