The Io Passion, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape<br></br>Wonderful Town, Grange Park Opera, Hampshire

A simple and seductive passion

For those who like to think they're hip to contemporary music, Harrison Birtwistle is a tricky case. Looking back over his work, there's an obstinacy to the writing: a punchy predilection for wrong-footing his listeners (Punch and Judy), for throwing curved balls (The Mask of Orpheus), for jarring (Panic), wearying (The Last Supper) or disturbing (Theseus Game). So why, having built such a difficult reputation over the last 30 years, has he produced a work as simple and seductive as The Io Passion?

The starting point of the opera is the end of an affair. In Stephen Plaice's beautifully organised libretto, the bitter lovers are each played by two singers and an actor; allowing a multiplicity of angles as their characters are gradually revealed through thought (spoken by the actors) and speech (sung) in a set that sees interior and exterior mirrored as the doubles enact their night rituals of watching and waiting. Birtwistle's rich circadian cycle of nocturnes and aubades for string quartet and basset clarinet is punctuated by ravishing ariettas, spluttered outbursts of unresolved argument and high-arching angular recitative. Letters arrive, are read, replied to and re-read as the moon comes up and streetlamp is lit. The rhythm is cool, lazy, reflective; the soundworld one of mourning, detachment, faint frustration and post-coital ennui. With the exception of Jove and Io's staccato pantomime coupling - Uh! Aah! Uh! Aah! Uh! Aah! Moo! - and the declamatory retelling of their myth, the writing is strikingly lyrical; recalling the sheer stillness of Copland's Quiet City, the resignation of Schütz's Musikalisches Exequien and the alluring irresponsibility of semi-conscious fantasy. But whose fantasy is this?

Aside from alluding to musical convention, the passion of the title can be read in two ways: as a rush of sexual desire or as extreme suffering. But the conjunction of the two - especially in Plaice's graphic depiction of Io's debasement - is an uncomfortable one. Aside from the sense that The Io Passion is, at 90 minutes, slightly longer than the material warrants, my main criticism is of its dated sexual politics. The notion that a holiday fling on a Greek island - however intense the connection, however heavy with meaning, however supernatural - might be analogous to the rape of Io by Zeus is peculiar enough. That that analogy might be titillating to someone whose former lover has effectively become her stalker smacks of the era when liberal men would chomp on their cigars while discussing the female orgasm. Nonetheless, The Io Passion is Birtwistle's strongest work for several years: succinct, organic and theatrical in a way that The Last Supper - with its queasy blend of bombast and navel-gazing - never was. With stunning designs by Alison Chitty, exquisite direction by Stephen Langridge, and exceptional performances from clarinettist Alan Hacker, Quatuor Diotima, singers Claire Booth, Amy Freston, Sam McElroy and Richard Morris, and actors Teresa Banham and Joseph Alessi, this is a persuasive new opera from the grand old man of British music - albeit one that owes more to Lawrence Durrell than Robert Graves.

So from Greece to Manhattan, courtesy of Grange Park Opera's plucky production of Bernstein's Wonderful Town: a mad-cap melting-pot of musical styles, from Western Swing (Ohio), to Latin (Congo), to Oirish (MyDarling Eileen), to Ragtime (Wrong Note Rag). Written in the same year as Trouble in Tahiti, Wonderful Town is an affectionate, if somewhat slender, tribute to the American dream. A prototype Carrie Bradshaw, Ruth (Mary King) is a wisecracking writer from the Mid-West with a dreadful record in relationships, a slim portfolio of cuttings, and an even slimmer and prettier little sister, Eileen (Sophie Daneman), who always gets the boys. The sisters come to New York, fall in with the Christopher Street bohemians, rent a cockroach-ridden studio, meet a boatload of dancing Brazilian sailors, get arrested, sing in a jazz dive and, finally, find true love. It's sweet, sunny stuff - entertainingly realised by director-designer Antony McDonald in the face of a production budget with at least one nought missing and some notable miscasting - but far from Bernstein's best and set alarmingly low for operatically trained voices. Still, with a chorus merrily shaking their tushies as the flower-arranging policemen, and a winning performance from Graham Bickley as the hard-bitten magazine editor with a heart of gold, it's hard to resist Wonderful Town.

Which leaves but a tiny space to commend Emma Bell's incendiary performance in the title role of Rodelinda: still the most persuasive reason to catch what must surely be the final revival of Jean-Marie Villégier's dismal 1998 production for Glyndebourne. Perhaps the best that can be said of this mannered production is that it has so little to say that it concentrates the mind on Handel's music. If in doubt, just close your eyes.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'The Io Passion': Almeida Opera, London N1 (020 7359 4404), from 6 July; 'Wonderful Town': Grange Park Opera, Hants (01962 868600), to 30 June. 'Rodelinda': Glyndebourne, Sussex (01273 813813), to 31 July