With tumblers, glossy horse, besequinned toreadors and excited onlookers, the final act of Francesca Zambello’s 2006 staging of Bizet’s Carmen is as good as opera gets, coiling up unbearable tension before the final tragedy. The preceding three acts work pretty well, too, designed in hot, Mediterranean colours by Tanya McCallin.

With each revival, the dramatic emphasis has been differently angled. First time, it was chiefly about the main relationship, between Don José and Carmen. Here, rather, it swung round to point up the work’s ensemble qualities: the choruses, the smaller group set-pieces with Carmen’s gipsy friends and smugglers.

For once Carmen herself was sung by an authentic Latin, the Spanish mezzo Nancy Fabiola Herrera. She looks and sounds the part but doesn’t play up the sexy bitch element. If anything she’s rather too restrained, hardly showing a leg or a cleavage, but nonetheless interesting for resisting the usual cheap solutions.

Her Don José, poor incompetent fool that he is, was the generous spirited, big voiced Argentinian tenor Marcelo Alvarez. Despite apologies announced for illness, he still let rip in the fortes and brought natural grace to the pianissimos. His Don José tends towards the two-dimensional, without the subtle vulnerability Jonas Kaufmann unforgettably brought when the production was new. But Alvarez sings from the heart and that’s good enough.

As the bullfighter-stud Escamillo, American bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen managed his horseback entry with skill though sometimes, and he wasn’t alone in this, he seemed vocally underpowered by being too far upstage. Susan Gritton’s Micaela was tender and ideal. The ROH orchestra played with crisp urgency, passionately but cleanly conducted by Daniel Oren. Zambello knows how to make a good show, as this sharply etched evening illustrates.

Until 17 April (020 7304 4000)