The Haunted Manor, Sadler's Wells, London

The ghost of Polish opera past

For confirmation that Polish musical life didn't begin and end with Chopin, you need to go to Poland - or have Poland come to you. The Polish National Opera arrived in London bearing gifts: three multicoloured, multitudinous operas from across the centuries. The first in every sense, coming as it does from the founding father of Polish music, was something called The Haunted Manor by Stanislaw Moniuszko. Who? Exactly. Perhaps we'll know his name a little better when Poland joins the EU.

For confirmation that Polish musical life didn't begin and end with Chopin, you need to go to Poland - or have Poland come to you. The Polish National Opera arrived in London bearing gifts: three multicoloured, multitudinous operas from across the centuries. The first in every sense, coming as it does from the founding father of Polish music, was something called The Haunted Manor by Stanislaw Moniuszko. Who? Exactly. Perhaps we'll know his name a little better when Poland joins the EU.

Actually, that was the principal reason for this visit - a celebration; an occasion to promote the cultural ancestry of the land of the mazurka and the polonaise. Moniuszko, who lived and breathed and all but invented Polish musical culture, does that rather nicely. Unlike Chopin, who enjoyed the fruits of his superstardom abroad (the EU would have suited him), Moniuszko remained in Warsaw where he effectively composed the Polish songbook and furnished the lyric theatre with some 25 operas and operettas. The Haunted Manor of 1864/5 is the most famous, perhaps because it upset the occupying Russian authorities with its rampant nationalism. In fact, it's a rather benign slice of Polish folklore whose heroes, the brothers Stefan and Zbigniew, forsake women and pledge bachelorhood to fight for the fatherland. Fat chance. Women, you see, have a tendency to sap a fighting man's strength. And men don't? Well, not then, they didn't. Anyway, the haunted manor of the title is but a clumsy symbol of resistance. The Russkies didn't like it; the Poles did.

As well they might. It's chock-full of jolly Polish tunes and any and every excuse for a quick mazurka. I suppose its closest natural relative, stylistically speaking, might be Smetana's The Bartered Bride - though Smetana's loveable fable is richer and of a more diverse quality, not to mention having better numbers. Actually, the big showpiece from The Haunted Manor is an elaborate aria for the heroine, Hanna, which owes more than a little to the Italian bel canto, including its violin (as opposed to flute) obbligato. It was rather well sung by the company's star soprano, Iwona Hossa, tossing off her resolute roulades in a display of selfless solidarity for her knight in shining armour. The only other really memorable singing in an evening conspicuous for its uneven vocal quality (or should I say, lack of quality) came from one of those sepulchral Polish basses, Romuald Tesarowicz, as the steward. He all but stopped the show with his hit number about the old clock whose mechanism is spookily set in motion by strangers (it's those Russkies again). "Older than time itself," he gruffly intoned.

Which was a fair comment on the staging. It was as if the director and designer had unwittingly mislaid a century or so of operatic history. We weren't talking a production, so much as a relic.Could it be that the original 1860s staging has been painstakingly preserved as some kind of touring national shrine? Phantoms of the opera, indeed. There was a clue in the presence of a mysterious painter to the side of the stage who made a new canvas of every scene. Preserving the past for the future? And what of the tableau in the final scene that hinted at a hundred years of dance crazes? Was that a comment on EU membership?

The best thing about the evening was the conducting of Jacek Kaspszyk, whose orchestra duly kicked up some dust with Moniuszko's catchier cross-rhythms - that, and the moment we'd all been waiting for: a grand company mazurka all in white. The collective pulse rate rose a little with that. Otherwise, the only ghosts haunting this manor were the director and designer, whose presence at the curtain call was plainly an apparition.