MUSIC : When all the energy was in the pit

With so productive a composer as Verdi (28 operas from Oberto to Falstaff), it's easy to forget that he spent almost as much of his time revising old works as initiating new ones. Simon Boccanegra was a case in point, and it exists in two distinctive versions, more than 20 years apart, from which British audiences have no escape this month. WNO are touring the familiar Version II; Covent Garden is about to stage the unfamiliar Version I; and for good measure, the Garden has just revived its Elijah Moshinsky staging of Version II - presumably so we can all make an intelligent assessment of which works best.

It won't be difficult. Verdi rewrote this score because the original was muddled and congested; and although the revision isn't exactly a paragon of clarity, it does a far better job of telling the story - creating in the process one of Verdi's finest stage ensembles, the Council Chamber scene, and one of his most rewarding baritone roles. To my mind, that's enough. What Verdi jettisoned I'm happy to forget.

But at the same time I'm not thrilled by what the Garden is offering as its Version II. The production looks tired, the set shabby. And while the cast - largely the same as when this staging first appeared in 1991 - is perfectly acceptable, it does not dazzle. Alexandru Agache is strong, dignified but uncharismatic in the title role. Kiri Te Kanawa, a favourite Covent Garden Amelia for two decades, still has undoubted grace and beauty but her bottom notes were thin on Tuesday and the top ones edging into hard tone. There's a new Adorno in Marcello Giordani, who is likeable, with an importunate eagerness of attack. But otherwise the energy isn't so much on stage as in the pit - supplied by Georg Solti, who prods, pokes and hustles the orchestra into persistent profile as the show's true star. In some ways that's a pleasure. But it's not how things should be.

From an abundance of Boccanegras to a quantum of Korngold. Last week was the centenary of Erich Korngold's birth, and there has been a lot of him about - including an anniversary concert at the Austrian Embassy and a bizarrely dramatised song recital in the Covent Garden Festival which portrayed him (through an actor) at the moment of death being wafted heavenwards by angels (aka baritone Karl Daymond and pianist Ingrid Jacoby looking embarrassed in a pair of muslin frocks). It was de trop, but you could say the same of Korngold's music; and however fanciful this vision of his death, it at least played under a title, Between Two Worlds, that was a true reflection of his life.

Korngold was one of the generation of Jewish composers displaced from Europe into America by the Third Reich: lucky to be alive but struggling with new identities. Where Schoenberg found a home in academia, and Weill on Broadway, Korngold settled in Hollywood and stayed there - enjoying the sybaritic life of a successful film composer but hounded by a sense of self-betrayal. As a child in Vienna he had shown a genius that arguably outclassed Mozart's at the same age. By his early 20s, with the opera Die Tote Stadt behind him, he was considered the leading Austro-German composer after Richard Strauss. And had things developed as expected, he should have emerged as one of the presiding creative figures of the 20th century.

But things did not develop. At 50 he was writing essentially the same full-bloodedly romantic scores, saturated with fin de siecle tonality, that he produced at 15. And what, at 15, had seemed prodigiously advanced now seemed vacuously stale. Museum exercises in a dead language. Conventional wisdom wrote him off as a victim of circumstance who failed to suffer nobly.

But the blossoming interest in his anniversary suggests that opinions have begun to shift. Maybe Korngold wasn't a victim at all - just genetically programmed to peak early and settle into an unchanging language. Maybe that language had something worthwhile to say, even as it atrophied. And maybe Hollywood wasn't such a bad place to be saying it. Film music was, after all, a discipline that encouraged resourcefulness and focus in composers like Britten and Walton. You could argue that the studios filtered down the excess in Korngold's music: simplifying over-elaboration, clearing congealed harmonies and building firm foundations for the concert scores he re-worked from his films - especially the once unfashionable Violin Concerto which seems to be creeping back into repertory.

Understandably, though, the centenary concerts have so far concentrated on Korngold's songs. They were central to his life's work; and the ones in the CGF's dramatised recital were superbly done, even if they came (unforgiveably) without identification or translation. Karl Daymond is a hugely promising young baritone, with a sound that isn't always clean (he needs to clarify a sometimes dense delivery and work on his diction) but is impressively attractive. Ingrid Jacoby, the pianist (who also played at the Austrian Embassy concert: she must like this stuff), is impressive too, with a fierce, muscular intelligence that injects a shot of moral fibre into the ornate embellishment of Korngold's keyboard style.

It's heartening to discover how well the music responds to this affirmative approach; and hearing it made me think that Korngold's greatest problem has been interpreters who undervalue his strength of character. Whether the world is ready to disbelieve the old joke that his scores are more korn than gold, I don't know. But it's certainly time to acknowledge (a) that his mittel-European late romanticism had an enduring influence on the lighter life of American music, and (b) that this is no shame.

Another composer came under the scalpel this week with the start of the LSO's Barbican series Ravel Through The Looking Glass. Directed by Andre Previn, it opened uncertainly with a prosaic reading of the magical Mother Goose ballet and a near-disastrous Tzigane from an American violinist, Eunice Lee, who had neither the muscle nor the technique to cope. But the Daphnis and Chloe Suites I & II were ravishing, and made the point that Ravel is much more than the dispassionate, Swiss-clock-making miniaturist some commentators would have you believe.

Finally, a footnote to Jenny Gilbert's review of Mark Morris at the Coliseum. I can't imagine what commended Handel's L'Allegro as stageable dance music, or how ENO rationalises the incorporation of this balletic enterprise into its opera season. But thank God that in both cases someone stepped beyond the bounds of reason, because the result is pure enchantment: the most musically literate choreography I've ever seen, and a contemporary response to period style that stands as a beacon for directors working in the lyric theatre. The cuts to Handel's score are justified, the allocation of music to voices (an open matter, since Handel repeatedly changed his mind about it) reasonable; the five solo voices (positioned in the pit) include particularly eloquent singing from Ian Bostridge and Janice Watson; and the orchestral sound under Jane Glover is fresh and clean. Altogether, it's the best experience I've had from ENO in years. A pity it's not opera.

Simon Boccanegra: ROH, WC2 (0171 304 4000), Wed & Sat.