A star is born at ENO

MUSIC

THE OLD regime at ENO wasn't immaculate: it had its moments of misjudgement and excess. But there were also quarter-hours of glory such as David Pountney's cool, spare, elegant production of Rusalka, which is back on the boards again - looking slightly worn and of its time (1983) but still a thing of beauty that triggers a legitimate nostalgia for the past. The way Pountney reads its mermaid-falls-in-love-with-mortal story as a Freudian myth of flowering sexuality is obvious, no doubt, but done with delicacy, charm and discernment. And the scenic transformation of the heroine's nursery into a world of watery romance is theatre-magic pure and simple: some of the most felicitous design work Stefanos Lazaridis has ever done.

In short, it's a joy to see all this again; and better still to see it enhanced by the arrival of the very lovely Susan Chilcott in the title role. A star. I thought so back in 1993 when she sang Lady Rich in Opera North's Gloriana. Then, last year, she was a beguiling Tatiana on the Glyndebourne Tour. And now, as Rusalka, she trumps all the ENO predecessors in the role I can remember with a performance as dramatically poignant as it is vocally strong. The sheer dimension of her singing, not to say its evenness and richness, puts it at the front rank of young British vocal talent; and it can only be a matter of time before she makes her mark on the international circuit. Catch her while you can.

The other notable thing about this Rusalka is the return to the ENO pit (after 25 years) of Richard Hickox; and although he had an evident struggle on his hands to keep together an orchestra that's sadly out of condition these days, the result was an impressive vindication of Rusalka as the high point of Dvorak's long but not always distinguished involvement in opera. Why Hickox has been kept out of ENO for so long I don't know. But it could certainly do with more of him; and as ENO's senior management were at the 1995 Gramophone Awards on Wednesday they will know that he picked up the Opera of the Year award for his recording of Walton's Troilus and Cressida.

Having trumpeted the cause of Troilus on these pages with relentless fervour, I was pleased about that. And I'm pleased, too, that Dawn Upshaw's off-Broadway recital disc I Wish It So, which was my choice for disc of the year last Christmas, won the Music Theatre award. Other categories were dominated by Simon Rattle (as usual), Pierre Boulez (Best Contemporary), Jose Carreras (Best Seller), Michael Tippett (longevity prize) and Maxim Vengerov, whose Prokofiev/ Shostakovich Concertos disc for Teldec was voted overall Best Issue. As for the proceedings themselves, Best Moment was watching an award go to Decca's Entartete Musik series of composers silenced by the Nazis as I sat at table beside Frau Wilhelm Furtwangler: widow of the man who, rightly or wrongly, has passed into history as Hitler's bandmaster. Frau Furtwangler was herself there to collect an award, for the historic-interest reissue of her husband's 1954 Beethoven Nine. Whatever the pros and cons of this annual record industry love-in, it can't be accused of partisanship.

The pros and cons of period pianos are finely balanced, and I understand why a champion such as Melvyn Tan finds their clarity and lightness inspirational, as I understand why an opponent such as Alfred Brendel thinks their hard, thin sound a voluntary handicap. Why drive a Lada when you've got a Bentley in the garage? But the cons increase when the piano is not merely period-reproduction but period- original; and the performance I heard Tan give in Oxfordshire on Tuesday, using an original Johann Streicher instrument of 1838, wasn't a wholly happy experience. The upper octaves of the keyboard had the sourly pizzicato quality Noel Coward must have had in mind when he said that Mozart always sounded like piddling on flannel. And Tan wasn't even playing Mozart here: the repertory was Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin.

In fairness I should say that historically it was the right piano for the music. Period players are expected to match instruments to tasks like a golfer pulling clubs out of his caddy bag, and Tan's Streicher was made in the very year that Schumann wrote Kinderszenen, the first item on the programme. Schumann, we know, played Streicher pianos. But I can't believe Schumann played his like Melvyn Tan, who is an illuminating Mozart and Beethoven interpreter but not so hot a Romantic. Nothing that he played here seemed to me to touch the inner nerve of the music. And when it came to the Chopin - well, give me Rubinstein, Perahia or Kissin any day.

But it provoked one interesting thought. For a composer we remember as an arch- Romantic, Chopin was strikingly reluctant to associate himself with the stylistic attributes of Romanticism. He prized the exacting clarity of Bach and Mozart. And if Tan's approach does nothing else, it allows Chopin that backward glance, presenting him in terms of where he came from rather than the more familiar terms of where he leads to (Rachmaninov and Debussy).

I coyly mentioned that this concert took place in Oxfordshire; it was in fact the opening event in a new mini-festival set up by Raymond Blanc in his celebrated Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, and the sort of gilded package - sold with gourmet dinners - one tends to view with scepticism. But Blanc seems to be serious about this festival, and launching it with artists like Tan is promising. Less promising is the fact that the festival ended last night (I wasn't there) with a Lesley Garrett gala evening: the musical equivalent of rounding off a menu de degustation with a Knickerbocker Glory. But these are early days. The Manoir isn't far from Garsington, the garden-opera centre, and ideas are floating round for some kind of collaboration. Blanc and Leonard Ingrams don't seem obviously matrimonial material, but you never know.

Matrimony lies close to the heart of Maureen Duffy's new play-with-music, The Masque of Henry Purcell, which opened this week at the Southwark Playhouse; and because we know so little about Purcell beyond his surviving scores, what Duffy has to say about him and his wife is largely, necessarily, the stuff of fiction. But it's sensitive, informed, convincing; and the way it turns into an apologia for the wife (who bears legendary responsibility for her husband's death, having locked him out of the house and caused him to catch cold) arrests the tendency of these domestic details towards 17th-century sitcom. Shuna Snow plays Mrs Purcell, and it's a nicely measured performance that outclasses everything else - including the music (Purcell's own), which is deftly interpolated into the text but delivered by less-than-singing actors with a quartet of not-so-period instruments (one of them an electric keyboard).

Outrageous, of course. But in fairness, the rough edge of it all does illustrate an important observation Duffy makes in her text about the equilibrium with which high and low art co-existed in Purcell's creative life. And anyway, when the composer's tercentenary finally hits us next month there will be opportunities enough to hear the real thing.

'Rusalka': ENO, WC2 (0171 632 8300) in rep to 27 Oct; 'Henry Purcell': Southwark Playhouse, SE1 (0171 620 3494) to 28 Oct.