CLASSICAL MUSIC / Pure pleasure in an overflowing Bath

BATH IS a civilised, discriminating city that lives just enough of its life in the 20th century to be more than the Georgian theme park Americans take it for; and it has a civilised, discriminating festival - essentially of chamber music played in elegant interiors that look like Adam but usually aren't. The programmes this year have been looking at Romanticism past and present (specifically, at the relationship between Robert Schumann and Robin Holloway) and at songs reprocessed into purely instrumental terms. And if that doesn't sound wildly exciting, the reality has been pure pleasure.

It began with two superlative Nash Ensemble concerts last week that included Oliver Knussen's recent Songs without Words (an elevated kind of karaoke that sets a sequence of poems but then removes the texts) and the premiere of a work by Mark-Antony Turnage: a horn trio dedicated to the memory of Sir Charles Groves called At Close of Day which was itself a wordless song, surrendering to the romantic implications of the horn with an edgily elegiac calm that made it one of Turnage's gentlest, most inviting scores to date.

But the focus was Robin Holloway, who is Bath's featured composer and 50 this year: a time for looking back, in this case to the early Seventies when he came out against the prevailing avant- garde and declared himself a latter-day Romantic. The flushed fervour of his music from that period testifies to what a girding of loins and steeling of nerve it must have taken; and in retrospect it seems almost for protective companionship that Holloway turned to Schumann for inspiration.

First there was Scenes from Schumann in 1970, an orchestral paraphrase of well-known Lieder. Then came Fantasy Pieces on the Heine Liederkreis in 1971, which took things a stage further, beyond paraphrase and towards what motor mechanics would call a strip-down and refit of the original material, although written for smaller forces than the Scenes. When the Nash Ensemble played the Pieces in Bath they felt like chamber music struggling to contain a epic scale of statement. And they exalted in fat tonal cadences with the swagger of a young man awarding himself licence to outrage, as such luscious overstatement was bound to do in 1971. Thirty years on, we can just sit back and enjoy it; but the Nash's performance had all the rather desperate nervous energy these Pieces must have suggested to their first listeners. And because the concert incorporated the real, unadulterated Liederkreis (sung by Neil Mackie), there was a clear perspective on the physical process of transformation, the refit, that the songs undergo. To my ears this was vintage Holloway and unsurpassed by later works that surfaced in the festival to reflect the tougher, more constructivist aspect of his writing: works like the Concertino No 5 and a new Partita for Solo Horn.

When you're travelling back 600 years in time you can afford to take things more easily, and the pleasure of Philip Pickett's New London Consort was the affability with which he introduced his audience to a seriously Early sound world where expectations of harmony, structure and style didn't have to be challenged because they didn't yet exist. It was the world of the composers who fall in the forgotten void between Machaut and Dufay: composers of the madly complex ars subtilior whose flamboyance Dufay (the first musical genius of the Renaissance) would later straighten out into the beginnings of modern sonority. As usual, Pickett's soprano was the marvellously agile Catherine Bott whose bright, leggiero voice articulated like a harpsichord but with significantly more expression.

On the subject of keyboards, the Steinway at Bath's Guildhall took some punishment from Leif Ove Andsnes, the young Norwegian pianist who played the Britten Concerto in last year's Proms and has been taken up with a vengeance by Virgin Classics. Andsnes is a heavyweight performer who loads textures and enlarges gestures. The early Beethoven in his Bath recital was like late Beethoven, the Grieg explosive, and Debussy's Jardins sous la pluie reallocated to a monsoon climate. All too much. But if you thrill to youthful heroism, Andsnes has a lot to offer, and it comes with depth of feeling.

Critics have largely forgiven Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin for its romantic softening of the crisp, ironic tone of Pushkin, but not, apparently, producers. Howard Davies's new WNO production, which opened in Cardiff on Thursday, stages Acts I and II with a railway line running through Mme Larina's orchard into Tatyana's bedroom. Any minute you anticipate the late arrival of the 17.05 to Minsk - except it doesn't come because

there's a piano on the line which Olga drapes herself around and for a dreadful moment looks as though she's going to climb inside. It's not Tchaikovsky, so it must be irony; and it accompanies an updating of period cum downgrading of social status, from Napoleonic gentility to Chekhovian domesticity, that reduces the Larin's country dance to a village brawl and the Petersburg ball to an haute-bourgeois ladies' night. The result is not only a loss of brilliance but a disorientating drop in moral tone. We are no longer in a world where honour must be satisfied by duels, as the story says it must. And with such a humble background, you wonder how it is that Tatyana ever pulls a prince and makes it to the ball. She isn't Cinderella.

As for voices, it's a patchy cast commanded by singers who deliver less than their reputations promise. Janice Watson is a young lyric soprano widely tipped for stardom, with a technically impressive, smooth, fresh tone but limited emotional resources that don't make much of a showing in the Letter Scene.

Jason Howard's Onegin is another stylish piece of singing with an easy fluency, but too unobtrusive to command the stage. Beyond the fact that he looks like something out of D H Lawrence with a Kevin Keegan haircut I can't place his character. Nor, I suspect, can he.