Beautiful nightmare

Country-house opera may cater to the champers-and-strawberries set, but that doesn't prevent it purveying good art, and everything unveiled so far this year at Glyndebourne makes the arduous trip worthwhile.

Christof Loy's presentation of Iphigenie En Aulide is high-style Baroque, Nikolaus Lehnhoff's version of Kat'a Kabanova is as luminous as ever, while Graham Vick's initially derided production of Don Giovanni has silenced its critics through sheer conviction: the excremental lava-flow which dominates the set is an entirely justifiable directorial concept, given Mozart's own obsession with this substance.

Glyndebourne's latest unveiling is extraordinary. Carl Maria von Weber's heroic-romantic Euryanthe has never been accorded the respect won by his Der Freischutz because its plot has always been regarded as implausible. The heroine's honour is unjustly impugned, but her alleged crime is such a peccadillo that the emotions associated with it seem ludicrously overblown.

Director Richard Jones has assembled a first-rate team led by soprano Anne Schwanewilms in the title role, and you won't hear more gorgeous singing than hers anywhere else this season. Nor will you see a more gracefully marshalled chorus than the terracotta figures who people this nightmare landscape; nor a more haunting series of scenes than those which designer John Macfarlane has dreamed up.

Having decided the action must time-travel, he has devised a vast backdrop which inches slowly across the stage, starting with Caspar David Friedrich trees and skies, and progressing towards the tormented realm of German Expressionism.

Ravishing beauty gives way to sado-masochistic jaggedness, before ending in a surreal ghost-world. There were a few guffaws when the monster appeared in Act Three, but how do you present the most disturbing images of the Freudian subconscious to a well-oiled audience just back from their gastronomic labours during the interval?

The music is no less ravishing, with the conductor, Mark Elder, extracting magic from the Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment. Weber's score was evidently nourished in the same musical soil as Beethoven's Fidelio, and its skeins of melody float like gossamer over their spare instrumentation.

Meanwhile London is not without its delights. Francesca Zambello's Royal Opera version of Tchaikovsky's The Queen Of Spades - now over, but due to come back next season - is the most exhilarating feast of Russianness I've ever seen. You can feel the St Petersburg snow as the cast parade and cavort in it; the spooky plot with its searingly exalted music can seldom have come as powerfully across.

And the English National Opera revival of David Pountney's production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen is the most life-enhancing show in town. Joan Rodgers and Tom Randle head the glittering cast of singers, who are complemented by a no less glittering troupe of dancers in a crazy non-stop masque. Its kaleidoscope of jokes, transsexual stunts, and moments of sheer beauty takes the breath away.

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