Today's Weekend cover 'boy' Sir Peter Moores ought, I think, to feel well pleased with the latest production to have benefited from the largesse of the charitable foundation that bears his name. Garsington's Mayskaya Noch' (May Night) provides a charming, musically rewarding evening of entertainment well suited to the spirit of frivolity that many (but not all) expect of country house opera. It is brought to us by the same artistic partnership conductor Elgar Howarth and director Olivia Fuchs behind Garsington's 2004 production of Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki, which is also based on a Gogol story.

In an informative programme note, Gerald McBurney writes of its composer Rimsky-Korsakov's musical indebtedness to Donizetti, the creator of Don Pasquale, which opened this year's Garsington Festival. I confess this influence largely passed me by, except perhaps in the rich seams of melodic invention he mines during our journey into rural Ukraine. What I did notice, though, is that we again find, as in Don Pasquale, a rather pompous old man being made a monkey of by his juniors, to the delight of all.

The knockabout comedy involving the Mayor, Golova (Darren Jeffery), his much-put-upon sister-in-law (Clarissa Meek) and his well-heeled pal the Distiller (Stuart Kale) offers as much enjoyment, in its way, as the lushly romantic scenes in which his son Levko (Peter Wedd) woos and wins his beloved Hanna (Antonia Sotgiu).

Their eventual happiness, which is achieved despite opposition indeed, competition from Golova, comes through supernatural assistance. Their fortunes become bound up in a story of witchcraft and revenge involving rusalki, drowned maidens who live beneath a lake beside an old manor house. Repeated reference to this property by various characters seemed singularly apposite in view of another old manor's proximity to the stage. Would Garsington its doors and windows itself be figuring in the action, as it often has before? In fact, when the manor is revealed and with it its ghostly occupant Pannochka (Michelle Walton) it turns out to be in the same 'doll's house' style adopted by the designer Jamie Vartan for the earlier scenes. These variedly sized properties, against a deep blue background that suggests the lake, provide an ideal setting for bucolic scenes of horseplay, and traditional songs and dancing (choreography Claire Glaskin).

Garsington audiences will long cherish, I feel sure, the memory of Geoffrey Dolton giving us the drunken charcoal burner Kalenik's version of that celebrated Cossack dance, the hopak. Priceless which is rather what tickets for this glorious, impeccably performed production are, though you might get returns (01865 361636).