DASHING, exuberant, the Romanian State Opera Brasov brought joy to audiences at Malvern Theatre.

The company's title has rich implications of divas and maestros travelling in wagon-lits. In fact, these highly talented, very professional musicians arrived in a bus - a pretty sleek one, though.

There is democracy in casting, too: Principal parts distributed over a season, the line between principal and support very flexible. Rather than grand opera, they chose to cheer us up with Rossini and Donizetti, in their lightest mood. Opera buffa, indeed, and the Romanians, quite rightly, do not hold back on the buffoonery. In fact, they don't hold back at all. Cenerentola and Pasquale are both driven along at a gallop; and this is the pace that opera buffa, like farce, demands.

Equally this makes demands on the cast in terms of timing and ensemble work, which were unfailingly met. The sextet in the second act of Cenerentola is taken at a death-defying, daredevil pace that had me on the edge of my seat. The languor of the love scenes - first meeting of Prince and Cenerentola, serenade in Pasquale - is the more touching by contrast.

Choruses prance among scenery that makes a witty lot out of the little a foreign touring company can carry. Magnifico and Pasquale are buffoons painted with a broadbrush; Dandini and Malatesta suave as you like in appearance and voice.

But it is over the characters of Clorinda in Cenerentola and Norina in Pasquale that the magician's wand has passed, for both are played by Cristina Radu.

When, in the near future, La Radu is being fought over by La Scala, the Met and Covent Garden, we happy few in Malvern will be able to say: Ah, but we saw and heard her first.

Henry Ford