COUNTRY festivals have many charms and Ryedale Festival is right up there with the very best of them.

Part of the fun is that they lack concert halls and, naturally, opera houses. So venues have to be improvised.

Settrington's Riding School is an elegantly elongated rectangle, just wide enough for a stage and an orchestra, so the audience is relegated to the flanks. It's enough to make an opera producer apoplectic. Wherever he puts his singers, they are turning their backs on half the punters (and the conductor, too).

Still, Stefan Janski has the answers. Without spinning his principals like tops or whisking them from side to side, he short-changes no-one. He peaks in the duet between the disguised Guglielmo and the hesitant Dorabella, keeping them in constant, but slow-motion, rotation, not what you might expect in a love-scene, but absolutely magical.

Fortunately, too, Settrington's acoustics are excellent, lively but not echoey.

Even so, it was a close shave in the first act, when too little of Anne Ridler's translation was audible. There must have been a half-time pep-talk.

The quality in this show, which is repeated tonight and Saturday, starts with Malcolm Layfield's bijou band - a mere string quintet plus nearly a full complement of winds - which makes Tony Burke's orchestral reduction sound even cleverer.

The strings are supremely alert and oboe and horns deliver exceptional contributions among many glowing sounds.

Above them, it is John Molloy's Don Alfonso who holds most of the aces, his genuine bass sometimes boomy but mostly swivelling an avuncular eye and a silver-topped cane over the two swooning couples. These lovely sisters are much too charming, and certainly too nave, to be the butt of his knavish tricks. For it is their emotions, not the men's, that are left searingly ambivalent at the close.

Joelle Davis begins unremarkably as Fiordiligi, but rises superbly to the challenge of the opera's greatest aria, Per Piet.

Karina Lucas makes a lively Dorabella, with a rich mezzo to match: her arias, smoothly negotiated, suggest a talent to watch.

Rebecca El-Attar's Despina is a perky soubrette, more rude than wry.

Her vibrant tone would be enhanced by a wider range of facial expression.

The gentlemen are less certainly drawn. Jonathan Pugsley's steady Guglielmo is a little underplayed, while Robert Gardiner's more forward Ferrando can sound strained in the upper reaches. But what really counts is their teamwork, which is first-class.

Updated: 09:50 Thursday, July 29, 2004