It’s so refreshing to be with someone who does not cringe instinctively when you complain in a restaurant.

After the concert in the Millennium Centre Alison and I went for a meal in Demiro’s. The menu was divided into three basic sections so you could eat Welsh, Italian or Spanish. The Spanish section comprised an uninspiring choice of tapas with even less inspiring main dishes described in an interestingly macaronic form of the language. The Italian was very much what you would expect and the Welsh, stripped of the descriptions, were fairly basic.

However, by a judicious combination of menus we found a satisfactory meal. I had the Welsh cockles and lavabread with bacon in a small tartlet, followed by Turbot thermidor with rosemary potatoes. Very nice too.

Alison’s choice is circumscribed by her needing food cooked without dairy produce, but olives as a starter followed by duck breast in orange and brandy sauce - once the composition of the sauce was declared safe - seemed fine. The waiter assured Alison that the duck would be pink and moist, so it was disconcerting to see her meal with what looked like a well cooked piece of steak on it. The duck was ‘thoroughly’ cooked to the point of inedibility and it was at this point that the ‘complain or not complain’ process started. Given that Alison had had a number of decent meals in Demiro’s, and also given the fact that the meal was not by any stretch of the imagination, cheap, ‘complain’ won.

It is always annoying when complaining about food to have the waiter ask if you want it changed. What are you supposed to reply to that? “No, no, I was just giving you some information that you can add to your archive.” The second annoying thing is when the food has been taken away and another waiter appears defending the food that you had been given, in this case, “There was nothing wrong with the duck, it was well done as requested.” This, of course, would have been fine if that was what Alison had requested. As she hadn’t, it wasn’t.

By the time her meal appeared mine had disappeared – into my stomach, and the wine was running low. The request from the waiter asking if we required more wine and my witty response of ‘Who’s buying?’ elicited a jovial ‘I am!’ to which my instant rejoinder of ‘We’ll have a bottle then,’ seemed to have produced a most satisfactory outcome after the disruption of the food. We were serious, the waiter wasn’t, but the situation did resolve itself into two free (cheap) glasses of red wine. And we did buy another bottle of the Rioja.

So to the concert: ‘Chorus’, with the chorus and orchestra of the Welsh National Opera. I had expected an ordinary presentation of the famous bits of opera for the plebs. The concert was not like that.

This was a dramatic presentation in a staged form. From the rousing opening chorus from ‘War and Peace’ to the finale from ‘Candide’ there was a very satisfying flow to the evening’s entertainment. I suppose, given time, I could work out some sort of narrative thrust through the very different pieces, but it wasn’t apparent and I don’t think that it would have added much. The important aspect of the staging was that it allowed action to flow, visual interest to be kept up and presented the music to advantage.

The range of music was stimulating, with me receiving a little jolt of pleasure when the surtitles stated that the next piece was to be from ‘Die Tote Stadt’ – though it did not turn out to be the bit with the ghostly procession (or the only bit that I know well!)

The singing was quite presentable, but I felt that there was a surprising moderation in the gusto with which the chorus of WNO usually sing; this was especially apparent in the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves – a piece for which the chorus is particularly famed – but here, there was a distinct lack of ‘singing out’.

The orchestra continues to impress as their sound is well at home in the Millennium Centre. It is a continual revelation to those of us who have had to suffer the appalling acoustics of the New Theatre for so long!

A most enjoyable evening; the National Orchestra of Wales is easily capable of topping this experience with their performance of ‘Turangalila’ in St David’s Hall tonight. We shall see.