Euryanthe, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Lewes <br></br>Gary Cooper, Christchurch Spitalfields, London <br></br>The Silver Tassie, ENO, London

Exhumed: one long-winded, weary opera

Ever since Mendelssohn championed Bach, music has looked to the past as much as it has to the future; first through the democratisation of choral music in the Victorian era, then as a by-product of early 20th-century nationalism, and finally through the gut strings performance practice revolution of the late Sixties. Look through the festival brochures today and the slightest scribbling from a major composer will be there somewhere. Look through the CD catalogue and you can find anything from Goudimel to Entartete Musik. Alkan? Check. Zelenka? You bet. All you need is an open mind and a large chequebook.

But for every rarely performed work or composer whose reappraisal has brought pleasure to a previously ignorant listener, there is another whose public exhumation – however lavishily executed – will leave an audience cold. One such exhumation, alas, is Glyndebourne's new production of Carl Maria von Weber's early Romantic opera Euryanthe.

Quite why conductor Mark Elder has such a lasting passion for this work is beyond me. Unlike Gluck's equally rarely performed Iphigénie en Aulide (also at Glyndebourne this season), Euryanthe value is solely musicological. Weak of plot – boy accuses girl of infidelity, boy dumps girl in forest, boy realises mistake – long-winded in exposition and thin on character, the opera's multiple failures flatten even the fun of playing Spot the Influence. Round One (spot the influence on a later composer) is too easy: Wagner, though Weber makes Wagner seem remarkably concise by comparison. Round Two (spot the influence of earlier composers) yields only a too-tiny thread of Beethovenian string writing in one scene between Euryanthe (Anne Schwanewilms) and Adolar (John Daszak), a touch of Italianate decoration in the Act I finale, and a heavy smudge of Méhul across the dense woodwind colouration. As to the Weber that one might know or even love from Oberon or Der Freischütz, his wit and energy is replaced by turgid anxiety. Unwisely, that anxiety is exactly what director Richard Jones has chosen to highlight in the staging.

Forgoing period costume or naturalistic direction, Jones presents us with a nightmarish sequence of expressionist gestures, Freudian horror, fairytale forests, and cultish lack of individuality. The chorus – excellently sung, as ever – move as one. And though our heroine's vulnerability to the patriarchal mob mentality scarcely needs underlining, Jones, together with designer John Macfarlance, has presented a world of phallic symbols to loom over her wrongly questioned virginity. Sendak-style fantasy thorns press in on the characters, provide weaponry, track inexorably across the stage and tear through the walls of the foreshortened chamber that is Euryanthe's only sanctuary. With the exception of Adolar's sister's tomb – a giant death mask – there is no relief from this conveyor belt of menace, although the monster, a 12ft high Adolar-alike that might have been a coup de théâtre in 1823, provokes only first-night titters in 2002.

Even allowing for some fine playing from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Elder's zealously detailed beat, Euryanthe feels like a terrible waste of time, money and talent. Daszak, though enjoying the kind of glamorous arias normally reserved for pretty-boy tenors with less dramatic acuity than him, might as well be in a strait-jacket. Schwanewilms, whose lucid, thoughtful, passionate singing lifted the opening night, deserves a better Glyndebourne début role than this.

Only Lauren Flanigan, hamming it up gleefully as the evil Eglantine, is really allowed to occupy her role, though this too is hampered by a hand-jive that one can only assume was Jones's idea. If the best opera company in Britain can't make Euryanthe work with a line-up of this quality, I hold little hope for any other.

Only 10 or so minutes of harpsichordist Gary Cooper's Spitalfields Festival recital of Book 1 of Das Wohltempierte Klavier could be properly termed "rarely performed". They were, of course, those fugues in outlandish keys that one never attempts to play at home without the supervision of an adult, but which Cooper made sound as natural as the opening bars of the C major prelude. To hear all 24 preludes and fugues in sequence was an extraordinary experience; somewhere between an act of worship and a field trip. I never knew there was so much in it: stile antico solemnity, Corellian floridity, French galantérie, and the inevitable twist of creeping, brooding chromaticism – or that the stylistic keys to the B Minor Mass, the violin concertos and several cantatas could be found in one unpretentious volume of technical exercises. Cooper's predictably white-hot, sharply articulated race through the D minor and F sharp minor preludes was carefully balanced with generously broad accounts of the alla breve fugues, and a poignant and propulsive reading of the B flat minor and E minor preludes. And despite his disturbingly self-effacing speech about the harpsichord's dissimilarity to the piano, Cooper's French instrument was plenty expressive, growing enjoyably grungy in the more remote keys and leaning coolly against the meter to imply a change in dynamic. In an ideal world I'd have liked a little more of this, a bit more edge and less reserve, but this was a wonderful recital nonetheless.

Will Mark-Anthony Turnage's two-year-old First World War opera The Silver Tassie stand the test of time? Going by its current ENO revival, I'd say not. Setting aside the oddity of hearing hints of Bernstein-esque mambo in a 1915 Dublin tenement, too much of Turnage's spark and chutzpah is lost as soon as anyone sings, especially in the didactic chanting of Act II's trench scene. For such a dramatic writer, this a remarkably undramatic work. Though the two orchestral interludes pack real punch and much of the writing displays formidable technique, the vocal lines are awkward and inexpressive, often blunted by the orchestra (on fine form under Paul Daniel) or forced into an unnatural upward rhythmic cadence. The tenor roles (nicely sung by Marc Le Brocq, Bradley Daley and John Graham-Hall) fare best in the balance, the bass – and this includes the lead, Gary Magee – the worst, but only one character, Susie (Susan Parry) is shown to have changed or developed through the ostensibly harrowing story of one young soldier's permanent disablement.

Were it cut back, the dialogue more clearly paced, and the ensembles less artificial, The Silver Tassie could be a brilliant opera. As it stands it's just another anti-war oratorio with latin rhythms.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'Euryanthe': Glyndebourne Festival Opera (01273 813813), to 21 July; 'The Silver Tassie': ENO, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) to Sat