Music: What'll the neighbours sing?

Die Liebe der Danae

Garsington Festival

Owen Wingrave

Britten Theatre, London

Risor Festival

Wigmore Hall, London

Leonard Ingrams's pre-performance homilies at Garsington are usually confined to matters of housekeeping ("... our much-improved lavatory facilities ...") and neighbour-avoidance ("kindly leave the car-park by 11 and turn right"). He doesn't deal in self-congratulation, and you won't have noticed any last weekend when he precis-ed his achievements on Radio 3's Private Passions. But consider ...

A businessman sets up an opera company in his garden, open-air, from scratch. He has the weather, neighbours, and some highly sceptical professionals against him. Ten years on, his garden is a major venue, famous for rescuing Haydn operas from oblivion and for staging the big, unwieldy Strauss scores that even the Germans think twice about. He beats Covent Garden to Aegyptische Helena. He gives Daphne its first British staging outside Leeds. And this week Garsington became the first British company to stage - which has only been seen once before in this country, when the Munich Opera toured it here in 1953.

So rare is Danae that Strauss himself never saw a full public performance. Written during the war, at a time when the German opera houses were falling one after another to the zeal of Bomber Harris, it ended up with nowhere to play except Salzburg - where it was still in rehearsal when the 1944 festival peremptorily closed. By 1952, when Salzburg tried again, Strauss was dead. Thereafter, Danae all but vanished.

Why? Because it's big and challenging and oddball, in the semi-comic way of Helena. Strauss called it a "cheerful mythology", which means it has the epic grandeur of his other operatic trips to ancient Greece, but jokes as well. Germanic jokes that fall like lead weights through a tissue fabric.

To reduce the plot to its barest essentials, Danae is an impoverished princess, out for a beneficial marriage to King Midas. But Midas loses his golden touch, and ends up as a poor (though handsome) shepherd, leaving Danae with a choice. She can stay with him, in woolly poverty. Or she can succumb to the extra-marital overtures of an alternative suitor, Jupiter, who will see her right financially. Being a decent girl she chooses poverty, and you'd think that would be the end of the opera. In fact, it's only the end of Act II, leaving another act to go over the same ground in a long, Wagnerian, conversational epilogue - largely a duet.

This duet turns out to be the emotional heart of a piece that would otherwise have no heart at all, so you can understand why it's there. But the odd thing is that it's a love duet with one of the lovers missing. Danae spends the whole time affirming her devotion to Midas, who isn't there, in song with Jupiter, who is. This could be problematic. But at Garsington, the director David Fielding uses it to re-focus the whole piece on Jupiter who, in Act III, is a failed seducer taking stock of his relationship with the women he has pursued. In Fielding's hands, he also becomes Strauss himself, looking back on the women of his operas - the Arabellas, Sophies, Zerbinettas he has loved in music - and taking leave of them as he moves on, presumably to death.

This kind of reading is an imposition on the piece, but it's effective: it makes sense, it gives Act III a purpose beyond padding, and it's one of the most telling things I've ever seen a David Fielding show deliver. Fielding's work tends to be design-led (he usually does his own sets and costumes) and you sometimes feel the image comes before the idea. But in this case the idea is all; and it's a good one that redeems the piece.

As music, Danae is a patchy score, with too much doggerel and make-weight writing. It's no masterpiece. But there are moments that are masterly; and when they come, you feel the ageing hand of genius rediscovering its former strength. Elgar Howarth, the conductor, gets a richer and more cushioned sound from the orchestra than you'd expect in open-to-the- elements conditions. And though most of the voices are taxed by what they have to sing, there are surprisingly good performances throughout the cast: from James Oxley in the supporting role of Mercury to Peter Coleman- Wright's arresting Jupiter, Adrian Thompson's touchingly man-in-the-street Midas, and the homely tenderness of Orla Boylan's Danae.

Encased in bold, conceptual sets that run a highway to the future through an open bank-vault, Danae is in fact the probable high water mark of what Garsington can achieve in its present circumstances. To ask for more would be to ask for bricks and mortar: the proper theatre that will never be built on such a sensitive site. But meanwhile, Leonard Ingrams soldiers on with what he has. And I should add that this year, the soldiering included a pink candy-floss production of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri that played as a parody of Casablanca. Flashing lights announced "Rick's Cafe Americaine"; spies in fezs and false beards careered around the stage; and the escape was managed via a corrugated steel plane and a lot of smoke. Well, it was funny at the time. In retrospect, I'm not so sure.

Benjamin Britten's TV opera Owen Wingrave was big news at the time of its premiere in 1971, but not many people these days are so sure about the pacifist agenda in its story of a military cadet who doesn't want to fight. The sentiment is fine: it's just the way it dominates the piece, reducing art to propaganda and the medium for a message. A few years ago, with careful handling at Glyndebourne, it worked wonderfully. In Andrea Dixon's new Royal Schools production at the Britten Theatre, it doesn't, and the characters are cartoon-thin: like Albert Herring but without the laughs.

The singing, though, is wonderful, with one of the most professionally polished student casts I've seen. David Curry's big, brutally insensitive Lechmere (just as it should be), Inga Kalner's wretched Mrs Julian (ditto) and Donna Bateman's sympathetic Mrs Coyle are all impressive. And the Owen is outstanding: an Australian baritone called Grant Doyle with a striking presence and a dark-gold vocal beauty that should see him into a significant career.

It's common enough for opera productions to open in a festival venue and then move on somewhere else; but now, the festivals themselves move on. This week, Norway's Risor Festival decamped to Britain for an action replay of the chamber programmes it had already given on home soil. And though the Wigmore Hall doesn't generate quite the same cultural atmosphere as the fishing village with adjacent fjords that Risor seems to be from pictures, Tuesday's opening night did retain something of the energised, informal music-making that you find in nordic, small-town festivals of friends. Chief friends at Risor are the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and violist Lars Anders Tomter. And the players they invite are mostly young, keen and adaptable, encompassing wide-ranging repertory in variable performances.

What Tuesday lacked in polish it supplied 10 times in personality; and with Andsnes and Hakan Hardenberger in roof-raising form for Hindemith's Trumpet Sonata, this little festival turned out to have seriously big moments. That they were sometimes seriously brazen is, I guess, the price you pay for zest.