Derek Jole reviews a show which local audiences can catch at the Apollo Oxford on Thursday, December 5

To hear some talk, you might suppose the anti-hero Britten and his librettist Eric Crozier found in Maupassant sprang from the likes of Hoffman's people or Flaubert's: a man who's chronically at odds with his society, and deeply worried by the fact. Not so: the scene which meets us as the curtain lifts on Glyndebourne Touring Opera's revamp of the Peter Hall production of Albert Herring - a solidly realistic view of Lady Billows's stately-home interior - signals very little warning angst; it has the reassuring air of fifties Ealing comedy.

This impression, once established, is confirmed. Lady Billows, and her blinkered sycophants, prove custom-made for Margaret Rutherford and Co. They're paper-tigers in the end, and the punishment and ridicule they undergo is seated in the wrenching harmony which splits the dated English ariosa styles they choose. By inference, young Albert joins a new and winning social team: the one that's typified by Sid, and which we hear of in the list of rejects for the role of 'Queen of May,' or in the tittering folk among the Reverend Gedge's May-day worshippers. The losing side retains its honesty, that's all; and this emerges nobly in the Act 3 Threnody.

Comedy being, as they say, a serious affair, Richard Farnes's band, of chamber size, investigated Britten's barbed and witty, sometimes tender score - a miracle of textural transparency - with microscopic art in the performance I saw at Milton Keynes Theatre. Apart from one early moment of imbalance, when the orchestra swallowed Alison Duguid's lower register, it let the singers breathe and meet with comfort and encouragement the maker's testing intervallic vocal shifts. In Britten's radiant skein of sound, where every bar exposes every active artist almost equally, no mercy is reserved for those who fudge: and soon, in this respect, one's confidence was absolute. More than usually, in fact, the stage-performers reminded us of how, in these Britten music-dramas above all, the spread of vocal opportunity is such to make the singing, right from Sprechstimme out to full-blown aria, coterminous with character-creation. Sarah Fox's great portrayal of Miss Wordsworth, for example, merged a poised, seductive singing-tone with subtle evocations of a complex character, and few on stage fell short of this. The vigorous hues of Hal Cazalet's tenor, in the part of Albert - richer than Peter Pears's - and the glowing baritone of Jeremy Carpenter's Sid were always threads of multi-layered wizardry which touched responses to the men themselves and to the wider on-stage myth.

Albert Herring comes to the Oxford Apollo on Thursday.