Parsifal/Osterfestspiele Salzburg, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh<br></br>Prom 30/Simon Rattle, Royal Albert Hall, London <br></br>Albert Herring, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Glyndebourne

Close your eyes and it all works a treat

Over recent months, the specialist music press has been quietly debating the amount of attention given to the theatrical elements of opera in broadsheet columns. According to some, vocal technique should be pre-eminent, preferably accompanied by comparative references to historical performances. But is the broadly cultured reader served well by a retrospective assessment of deceased divas? Some of us think not. Newspapers address a readership as likely to devote an evening to reading the latest Carol Shields, catching the new Almodóvar, or watching Tom Stoppard's trilogy as to going to the opera. A readership perhaps intolerant of poor staging or unimpressed by opera's sometimes chin-stroking air of ivory-tower self-importance. A readership that might, in short, prefer a great concert performance of an opera to the type of full-staging that you have to close your eyes to enjoy and will curse your critic for recommending.

Well, that's who I write for each week in order not to send some very smart people off to some very silly productions. But to every rule there is an exception, and while director Peter Stein's Edinburgh Festival/Osterfestspiele Salzburg co-production of Parsifal is ultimately best left unseen – with the notable exception of one harrowing, very well-judged image during the Act I Prelude – conductor Claudio Abbado's Parsifal is an imperative. (Likewise the sweetly blended playing of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (GMJ) and the raw, sincere, pushily pubescent singing of the Tölzerknabenchor.) For those of you able to get to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in time for today's final performance, it is well worth the long queue for the £5 day tickets. But don't expect an account informed by Abbado's own illness or one that focuses on the anguish of Amfortas (Albert Dohnen). The defining quality of Abbado's Parsifal is serenity.

For Wagner-phobes like myself, serenity is a quality not immediately apparent in Parsifal. The drama is, at times, intense to the point of vulgarity, its message of purification through psychological or physical suffering seemingly borne of a fanatical ideology. (Those who have already seen this production will have noticed the semi-Burkhas initially hiding Stein's merry Flower Maidens.) The ritualistic debasement of Kundry (Violeta Urmana) – a Magdalen poorly treated in such an overtly Christian opera – is hard to swallow too; a poisonous expression of gender-hatred and superstition. Yet by the simple device of achieving a thin, bright, rapt sonority and almost rustic simplicity of delivery in the repeated phrase "Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor..," and lending it full symbolic value throughout the opera, Abbado, while not completely erasing the repugnant elements of Parsifal, balances them with redemption, charity and peace.

If Simon Rattle made impressive structural sense of this dense score last December at Covent Garden, Abbado marries rationality with dramatic conviction and tenderness. His tempi are beautifully fluid and each leitmotif clearly characterised; migraine flashes of blackened-scarlet, mud-streaked steel and gold, and a thickly perfumed religiosity to match the on-stage thurifers. Each of these qualities the GMJ projects with a precision, maturity and responsiveness beyond their years. Persuasively enough, in fact, to make you forget the slightly shambling chorus movements and the MDF and Perspex Grail Hall-cum-CD storage system.

Though Stein's staging has clarity, it is worryingly tattered, devoid of big ideas and content to tread the path of anonymous naturalism. (Though after the fish and fuzzy-felt of Klaus Michael Grüber's nutty Parsifal perhaps one should be grateful.) But what of the singers? Urmana's Edinburgh Kundry is a moan-for-moan, shriek-for-shriek, lurch-for-lurch reprisal of her Covent Garden Kundry, sung with equally familiar depth and beauty. Thomas Moser makes an effective Parsifal; acting well and singing with more connection as his character develops. Dohnen, though believable, made me miss Thomas Hampson's subtle Amfortas, while Hans Tschammer provided a pleasingly unegotistical Gurnemanz. The Flower Maidens are bonny, Gwynne Howell an excellent Titurel, and only Eike Wilm Schulte's pantomime Klingsor jarred, or, in view of his propensity for rolled Rs, should I say jarrrrrrrred. But these are tiny, tiny complaints in a performance that is otherwise remarkable.

After witnessing dozens of instances of gratuitous misogyny (on stage, that is), I've learned to enjoy some works while simultaneously grinding my teeth at the attitudes they embody (see Parsifal, above). Or at least I thought I had until last Sunday night's Prom of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand: a big sweaty bundle of chaotic quasi-fugal choral writing, Marian idolatry, horrendous misery (for Goethe's illicitly impregnated and subsequently executed Gretchen), and impossibly loud, oft-repeated chords. A work born of eight weeks self-imposed incarceration in an Alpine Hut and a serious madonna-whore complex. A work in which, if you're a woman, it truly pays not to read the libretto.

That any symphony could reduce Rattle to traffic-cop status should perhaps have come as less of a surprise than it did. (You may remember Colin Davis likewise hampered by Berlioz's bombastic Grand Messe des Morts two years ago.) But this is the one Mahler symphony I'd managed to skip in 30-odd years of listening and I doubt that, outside of a recording studio, any maestro can do much with this over-populated irrational mess of religious zealotry, sticky stretto and self-indulgence other than ensure that it stops and starts together. That said, it's no discredit to the host of singers from Toronto, Birmingham, London and Sydney's youth and adult choirs who managed both of these things, did a wee bit of phrasing, and stayed splendidly in tune with the orchestra(s); of whom I imagine one will be able to hear more when the concert is broadcast on BBC2, along with a ravishing madonna and whore from, respectively, sopranos Rosemary Joshua and Soile Isokoski.

Peter Hall's super-cosy, subtext-free production of Albert Herring, now in revival at Glyndebourne, is tailor-made for audiences who share John Major's dewy eyed and largely imaginary view of England's past: a past where the working classes doff their caps, the pinafores are nicely starched, and where Oedipal revenge means walking away from the maypole and marquee to a lock-in in a neighbouring village. Oh yes, if you enjoy Miss Marple, are uninterested in questions of repressed sexuality, are tolerant of bizarre ooh-arr accents – variously Norfolk, Estuary, Ambridge and Scandawegian of origin – and are happy to applaud sets as twee as an Edward Ardizzone illustration, this is the Albert Herring for you. Which makes it all the odder that, under conductor Vladimir Jurowski, cast and orchestra attempt to lend the opera a Stravinskian flavour. Which sadly makes it all the plainer that this is one of Britten's most parochial scores. Still, there's a sparky Sid from Christopher Maltman, a surprisingly grave Nancy from Malena Ernman, a brightly toned Albert from Alfred Boe, and a delightful Miss Wordsworth from Susan Gritton. Alas much of the rest of the cast are miscast in their roles – most notably Felicity Lott as an oddly flirtatious and pretty Lady Billows – so I'd be tempted to hang fire until the touring production starts this autumn.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'Parsifal', Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (0131 473 2000), today at 5pm. 'Albert Herring', Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Sussex (01273 813813) to 25 August