Operatic double bills are relatively common, but the one-acters are generally on distinct subjects. Welsh National Opera is trying the possibly unique ploy of an evening juxtaposing different treatments of the same story. It is Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a gothic tale that obsessed Debussy in later life and has much preoccupied the American composer (and billionaire) Gordon Getty (b1933)....

If there is a touch of vanity publishing about the presentation (its world stage premiere) of Getty's simply titled Usher House, the double take thus provided wasn't without interest. Whereas Debussy (like Getty, his own librettist) focuses intently on the psychological distress of Roderick, whose monologising takes on something of the egotistical gloom of Bluebeard in Bartok's opera, Getty fills the mise en scène with sociability and circumstantial detail....

The technological novelty of the visuals - embracing midair or mid-picture-frame appearances by Roderick's moribund sister Madeleine (Anna Gorbachyova), and hauntedballroom dancers - distracts us from Getty's economical or overthin score, but only confirms his idiom as a kind of stylistically indeterminate film music, fluent but insipid. His declamatory vocal lines are samey: an impulse of crispness promptly followed by a swell. And there is undue abruptness to the dramatic unfolding.

The piece does hold the attention, though, and Pountney has added some striking images, not least the silent downpour with which both stagings conclude.