In such company, Jones’s saucy tales of valley life sparkled anew. He spat out “A Thousand Trees” as if the story of the teacher-pupil affair was written yesterday, while a thousand Jones wannabes pounced on an electric “The Bartender and the Thief”.Before you realised the front man was no Dylan Thomas (“Be my devil, angel”), they had already started a new one, though slower songs “Hurry Up and Wait” and “Rewind” plodded along as the band’s inability to raise themselves from clunky rock basics left the trite lyrics exposed. “But as we got into the music, he grew very enthusiastic and the results were inspired. Kelly Jones has side-stepped expectations by delivering a decent album Live, though, his band rely on sheer perspiration. Yet if you follow his markings, it makes sense: the humour emerges, but also the dramatic and erotic sides to her.”Carmen can actually work very well in the concert hall: without the distraction of a staging, everything is more focused: the raw emotions are left to speak for themselves.”Tonight and Saturday (0121-780 3333). “Bizet left clear indications of how he wanted her to be sung.

The Seguidilla is marked ‘pianissimo’, but often singers blast it out aloud, and the sensuality gets lost. She’s amusing and great fun, but she also has an incredible temper.”Carmen is a subtle role, which too often gets misinterpreted,” she adds. These Finnish conductors have a really earthy, natural quality: there’s nothing artificial or showy about them – it’s all real.”Carmen is a free spirit, she’s seductive, and when she sets her mind on something and doesn’t attain it, she soon becomes frustrated. It’s a decade since Katarina Karn?, the dazzling Swedish mezzo-soprano, won the Cardiff Young Singer of the World competition.

Karn? hit the jackpot with the famous Seguidilla from Bizet’s Carmen Soon afterward, she sang Carmen at Paris’s Op?-Comique. She hasn’t sung it since, but this week she sings it again for two concert performances with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo in the Birmingham Symphony Hall. Did winning at Cardiff make a difference to her career? “You bet,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been living out of a suitcase for the past 10 years otherwise! Cardiff changed my life. But I’ve had a wonderful time since then: I owe it a great deal.”
Karn? sang Verdi’s Requiem in Birmingham with Oramo, and recently recorded a startling set of Szymanowski love songs in the Symphony Hall for EMI, under Sir Simon Rattle.”When I first met Sakari, he seemed very calm and quiet,” she recalls.