OPERA-lovers had their pick of an eclectic trio of first class performances at Poole Lighthouse this weekend thanks to English Touring Opera, on the fourth leg of their spring tour.

The season, themed around ancient and modern myths, opened on Thursday with a revival of the company’s critically acclaimed 2009 production of The Magic Flute – reviewed in Saturday’s Daily Echo – but over the weekend the fare was more esoteric.

The operetta Paul Bunyan, a boisterous if occasionally incoherent work packed with strong melodic lines and a mixture of American popular music styles, was written by Benjamin Britten just a few years before his first great operatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes.

Unlike King Priam, the third opera in the ETO’s ‘trilogy’, this affectionate parody of the American dream depends on production and a set which will draw the audience fully into its light-hearted and rather whimsical world.

Just looking at the great wooden beams and bunks and clutter of Bunyan’s logging camp assembled in the Lighthouse’s theatre on Friday night was a treat.

Fortunately director Liam Steel and his talented team have matched great imagination in set design with energetic choreography.

Bunyan himself, a North American folk legend who addresses both characters and the audience throughout the piece, was voiced with great warmth by Homeland and Band of Brothers star Damian Lewis, and there were fine performances from the whole cast, particularly Mark Wilde as Johnny Inkslinger (a self-portrait of librettist WH Auden).

This charming performance of a genial blend of folk tunes, country-style guitar, Broadway melodies and blues could not have stood in starker contrast to Saturday’s offering.

Michael Tippett’s Priam is a cold and angry deconstruction of the myths surrounding war, an allegory based around Homer’s Iliad and depicting the Fall of Troy as a cycle of vengeance.

The opera was commissioned to mark the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in the Blitz, after which Allied bombers enacted their own bloody vengeance on German cities.

Tippett, a pacifist who was imprisoned during the war, shows no mercy as his vain, brutal and self-serving characters cut each other down one by one, and his music is frequently harsh, discordant and carried on few instruments.

Director James Conway and the ETO again triumphed in a production with a bare brutalist set and minimalist classical costumes ornamented with feathers and animal bones, which conveyed all the savagery of King Priam, but which also emphasised its few tender moments.

Roderick Earle was excellent as Priam, his voice seeming to grow in power throughout the performance, and his acting at key moments like the opera’s jarring conclusion was perfectly pitched.

Nicholas Sharratt sang with great clarity and feeling as the adult Paris, while Charne Rochford’s mixed growling and bellowing as Achilles captured the brutality of a deeply unsympathetic character.

A contrasting pair by Britain’s two greatest post-war composers, well sung, well set and well enjoyed.