What a difference a day makes. Even with loving spoonfuls of goodwill toward British Youth Opera, it was impossible to emerge from Friday's first night of Puccini's La Rondine feeling that the “next generation of opera professionals” (the company's tagline) had been given their best chance to shine. How could you cheer individual effort when effort was manacled to an irritating production and an opera so hazardous for the young?

Twenty-four hours later, with Jonathan Dove's Flight, you'd think that another organisation was performing. Energy, focus, pitch, visual design, the fusion of singer and character, the Southbank Sinfonia's ebullience: everything zoomed to the top, creating a triumphantly enjoyable show suitable for everyone, not just BYO supporters, families and friends.

How to account for the quality gulf? One explanation lies in the operas' material differences. In his winsome light opera, blithely written in the teeth of the First World War, Puccini's trademark lyric flow makes very easy listening. But for students and recent graduates, finding the right tone for European operetta is as hard as locating the holy grail, especially when their show's producer-designer, John Lloyd Davies, goes about in hobnailed boots.

Everywhere you see sights that are unnecessary, jarring, or awkward. There is the floating picture-frame, uselessly doubling sometimes as a door; a flash of Bob Fosse's chairs and gartered legs, dropped in from Cabaret; heroine Magda venting her amorous despair by hurling, of all things, daffodils. Performers also jar, through the constraints of voices still developing or mismatches between character and physique. Meeta Raval and Telman Guzhevsky, heroine and lover (both pictured), have volume at their command; but Raval uses her pipes more effectively.

Dove's and April de Angelis's ten-year old airport opera, Flight - comic, contemporary, nervously rhythmic, English - proves a much tighter fit for young performers. If the cast is straining, that strain is invisible. They fizz with flair to spare; there's space only to single out Verity Parker, brilliantly commanding as the airport controller, Andrew Radley's touching Refugee, and the confused husband sung by Nicky Spence (so much better employed getting a solid opera training than vaulting for crossover glory on CD). Subdued in the Puccini, the Southbank Sinfonia reclaim their spunk under Nicholas Cleobury's vigorous baton.

And after the Rondine clutter and fuss, what joy to watch the direct, effective staging of director Martin Lloyd-Evans and designer Bridget Kimak, complete with genuine stage magic as the airport finally dissolves into a sky of stars. There are two more flights of Flight tomorrow and Thursday; don't miss either one of them.

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