Pelléas et Mélisande, Royal Opera House LondonRuth Palmer/Alexei Grynyuk, Wigmore Hall,London

Of the many scores that suckled at the bleeding breast of Tristan und Isolde, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is the most alluring and enigmatic. Though Stanislas Nordey's Salzburg Easter Festival production was widely criticised when it opened, this had little effect on advance bookings for its Royal Opera House run. Pelléas is such an opiate that those who are hooked will sit through any style of production, be it pop-Freudian or Pre-Raphaelite, while those who have yet to succumb will have been tempted by the casting of Simon Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager and Gerald Finley.

Nordey's staging offers a series of stunning images that connect only obliquely to Debussy's symbolism, and occasionally work in opposition to it. The flat, white lighting cruelly exposes the singers' real ages, while the sci-fi romper suits that most of them wear cruelly test our suspension of disbelief. Two styles of gesture are employed: hieratic and naturalistic. There is an odd blurring as the singers change from one to the other, which in Keenlyside's Pelléas is semi-permanent. Rarely is he secure on two feet. Often he wavers, like a life-drawing model weary of holding an awkward pose. This is also felt in his singing, which, though artful, is tense. By contrast, Gerald Finley's Golaud is a knotted tumour of misery and anger, whose agony subsumes even his son's terror during his monstrous abuse of Yniold (an excellent George Longworth).

The inexorable ice-dance of designer Emmanuel Clolus's vast sarcophagi - some studded with flowers, some blotted with blood - is more sensitive to the shades of the score than is the direction of the cast. Though beautifully sung, Kirchschlager's Mélisande is unknowable in the wrong way: self-contained, experienced, a close cousin of Maw's Sophie without Sophie's desperate sensuality. I don't think you need a castle or a lake in Pelléas. But you do need hair. Act III scene 1, where Kirchschlager is pinned to a tiny balcony among empty duplicates of her scarlet shift like a feebly twitching butterfly in a collector's case, is played as an erotic long-distance phone-call, minus the phone and minus the eroticism. Imagination is a powerful thing when you cannot touch the object of your desire. But it's not that powerful.

So is this Pelléas as frigid as its staging? Not in the pit. Here's the sorrow, here's the obsession, here too the hair, the water, the forest, and an uninhibited, almost improvisatory expressivity I could not have anticipated from Sir Simon Rattle. Musically, at least, this is a richly imaginative reading of the opera, with some of the most unusual, seductive and exciting textures that I have heard from this orchestra's lower strings. Still, it is sad that that such fine singing actors as Keenlyside, Kirchschlager, Finley, Robert Lloyd (Arkel) and Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Genevieve) should play second fiddle to a series of exquisitely lit boxes, and regrettable that Nordey has a keener sense for the architecture of his production than he has for its personnel.

Handed out like party-bags to cross-over bunnies and established artists with big-label contracts, the Classical Brit Awards rarely have a positive impact on young core-classical musicians. Until this year, when Ruth Palmer scooped the Young Artist Award a fortnight before her second Wigmore Hall recital.

Playing to an audience double the size of that at her debut, and battling Alexei Grynyuk's coarse accompaniment, Palmer seemed exhausted at the start of Beethoven's C minor Violin Sonata. Then the double-stopped sighs of the second subject sang out, and her dark, coppery sound took flight. If her Beethoven showed signs of tiredness, Palmer's Janacek and Bartok Sonatas did not.

This is where Palmer belongs, in the mordant, blistered, war-torn, soulful repertoire of Central and East Europe, and, most particularly, the fierce counterpoint of its works for unaccompanied violin. For a short while, Palmer deservedly has the A&R executives and agents at her feet. I just hope they will steer her away from lollipops and war-horses, and help her play the music she really believes in.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'Pelléas et Mélisande', Royal Opera House (020 7304 4000) to May 23