Nightshade/ Corpus cum Figuris/ Philharmonia Orchestra/ Brabbins, Festival Hall, London <br></br> Kat'a Kabanova, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Glyndebourne

The joy of menace and brooding

Household names among living composers are rare. Writing film scores may help or hinder your reputation (Michael Nyman, Philip Glass), as may extreme political statements (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen). But for most composers the attainment of international recognition and respect from a non-specialist listenership is down to intellect, imagination, craftsmanship, patience and a happy collision with the wider cultural zeitgeist. Which leaves us, more or less, with one name: John Adams. Until, that is, his Danish near-contemporary Poul Ruders's opera The Handmaid's Tale – taken from Margaret Atwood's polemical novel, nominated for two Grammy Awards, and the most inventive and intelligent modern opera since Adams's Nixon in China – receives its British premiere at The Coliseum next April, at which point there should, by rights, be two.

Ruders' music has long been one of those "best kept secrets" that lovers of contemporary music like to mutter about. But unlike good restaurants or sympathetic hairdressers, privately cherished Danish composers tend to remain secret. So does it seem rash to predict such success for Ruders? If you were lucky enough to catch The Handmaid's Tale in Copenhagen in 2000 or you've heard the recording (Dacapo 8.224165-66) it probably doesn't. Nor, I imagine, will it seem so to the variously dedicated or curious few at this week's Music of Today concert by members of the Philharmonia and conductor Martyn Brabbins at the Royal Festival Hall; a programme first performed by them in 1991 but entirely new to me.

This was a brilliant, fascinating, utterly involving performance, with Brabbins as incisive as ever and the Philharmonia's ensemble of 20 players bringing near-romantic softness to the quieter passages and dazzling attack to the climaxes. Nightshade – scored for silt-low brass and woodwind, tuned percussion, piano, and keening, rhapsodic violin and oboe solos (Helen Paterson and Jill Crowther) – predates The Handmaid's Tale by 13 years, Corpus cum Figuris two more. But both works show the expansion of energy, confidence and colour that led Ruders from the tentative character of his early keyboard pieces Three Letters from the Unknown Soldier (1967) and the Dante Sonata (1970) to a multi-layered expressive drama that can fix the attention of opera-phile and -phobe alike. Both works show menace and brooding quite at odds with Ruders' seemingly easy manner. Both show rhythmic flexibility and formal daring. Most strikingly of all, for a composer who employs serious extremes of pitch, tempo and volume – with an almost polychoral dialogue between the groups of upper strings in Corpus before the sudden rush into a waltz section – there is no sense that repetitive figures are used as insulation or filler. Nor is there that tedious rigged wrestling match between slow/quiet and fast/loud. But both works also show Ruders's ability to blur harmonic and structural edges without losing dramatic definition: a "fade-in/fade-out" device of the kind more commonly associated with visual media. Where some composers suggest scent, taste, temperature or touch, Ruders suggests colour and the absence of colour: Nightshade, rather obviously, a dense strata of monochrome shadings, and Corpus cum Figuris a palette of transparent brights – all of which the Philharmonia exploited superbly, making this Jubilee-saturated listener feel like a sensation-starved mole who'd accidentally emerged in the middle of a Kandinsky.

Alas, the revival of Nikolaus Leonhoff's 1988 Glyndebourne production of Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova inspired no such elation. Quite right, you might think; you should feel wrung out with misery after this monstrous, wretched, gutty opera. But I didn't feel that either. Instead I achieved a personal first with Janacek, which was to feel totally unmoved.

Before the Glyndebourne season started I had doubts about the wisdom of performing Kat'a with an 85 minute picnic break. But the problems with this hopelessly dated production are not those of impaired audience concentration. What Leonhoff's unsympathetic, exaggerated staging fails to convey is any sense of progression; an emotional arc running from Kat'a's sublimated sexual frustration when we meet her, looping backwards to her remembered childhood fantasies, and reaching a fatal climax in her suicide. Here, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, poor Kat'a (Orla Boylan) runs the gamut of emotions from Y to Z; starting as a live hysteric and finishing as a dead hysteric. The Kabanicha (Susan Bickley) is an amateur dominatrix, Varvara (Linda Tuvas) harbours sapphic leanings towards Kat'a, while her lover Boris (Pär Lindskog) is a cipher. Leonhoff's blunt cartoon characterisations assist none of these singers in their vocal or dramatic performances – though the same could be said of Jiri Kout's brusque and ill-timed conducting – and the only performer to emerge unscathed (Timothy Robinson) plays the only character (Vana) to be unengaged with Kat'a's story. A coincidence? I think not. Time to throw this Kat'a Kabanova into the Volga again. For good.

'Kat'a Kabanova': Glyndebourne Festival Opera (01273 813813), to 19 July

a.picard@independent.co.uk