Opera - Peter Conrad discovers a disruptive spirit at the heart of Haydn

At the beginning of his oratorio The Creation, Haydn imagines the chaos that existed before music arrived at the notions of concord and harmony; then, at the moment when God switches on the light, he invents his own melodious art all over again. The feat is typical of this quizzical, ironic creator and destroyer of forms. His symphonies mimic hens pecking and clocks ticking, though one of them also explores the sober introversion of a philosopher. The conventions are always likely to be dismantled - abruptly when a big bang disrupts the festivity in The Surprise, more stealthily when the members of the orchestra drift offstage in The Farewell and leave the music to die by degrees. These organised, articulated sounds struggle out of chaos, but are subsumed by silence soon enough.

Haydn's two dozen operas - mostly written for the court theatre at Eszterhaza, a Hungarian Versailles dug out of an insect-infested swamp - are equally iconoclastic. They have been neglected ever since the early 19th century, but now they have a champion in the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt who, working with his period band Concentus Musicus and the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, has been responsible for a series of revivals. First came L'Anima del Filosofo, a quirky recounting of the Orpheus myth, in which the divinely gifted singer is decapitated by bacchantes. Next was Armida, about the inconclusive encounter between crusading Christianity and oriental witchcraft. Now it is the turn of Orlando Paladino, which is being taken on a short European tour before a recording in Vienna; I heard it in Lisbon, as a part of the concert season organised by the Gulbenkian Foundation, which - occupying its own park in the middle of the city, with an ornamental lake, a Greek amphitheatre, and overgrown paths through artificial jungles - comes as close as you can find these days to the princely munificence of Haydn's patron Eszterhazy.

Orlando Paladino appears to be a garbled hybrid of nobility and nonsense. The deranged paladin menaces the distraught Angelica, whose new lover Medoro is too busy melodiously pining to defend her. The sorceress Alcina intervenes, and imprisons Orlando in an iron cage or conjures up monsters to fight him; she then repents and reverses her spells. Angelica, deserted by Medoro, several times attempts suicide but never succeeds. A barbarian king called Rodomonte struts on and sings swashbuckling rodo-montades. Orlando's squire Pasquale romances the shepherdess Eurilla, performing the vocal equivalent of a violin concerto by Paganini. Orlando at last forgets his obsessive fury after a therapeutic immersion in Lethe, the river of oblivion, and denies that he ever fancied Angelica. All concerned chirrup happily, and point up a convenient choral moral about loving your neighbour.

It may sound pointlessly zany, but Harnoncourt takes this dramma eroicomico seriously, and in its collisions of opposed moods finds the instability that for him is the essence of Haydn. Chaos, the sonic womb of The Creation, here subverts chivalry by making Orlando insane. The same disruptive spirit also overturns the somnolent peace of pastoral. The opera begins with Eurilla complaining about having to work (Haydn detested routine); her father rushes in, alarmed by the approach of Rodomonte, and, from then on, the flustered panic never lets up. An aural violence batters the characters. The warriors declaim their threats to the accompaniment of blaring horns, though their only battles are brief, absurd skirmishes. Alcina announces herself by taking over the percussion section and banging a drum: this is her equivalent to the surprise that paralyses Haydn's 94th Symphony.

Each character seems to have his or her own vocal style, which turns the opera into an unsynchronised combat between lyricism and belligerence, heartfelt emotion and jabbering, accelerated patter. As Eurilla, Maria Cristina Kiehr flutes and flutters seraphically, while the Pasquale of Markus Schafer, boasting that he can sing in the castrato register, caponises himself in one of his arias. Alfred Muff's Rodomonte thunders, and, as Alcina, Elisabeth von Magnus hurls capricious lightning bolts. The Orlando of Michael Schade slouches on depressively and moans a lament in what might be the speech-song of Schoenberg. James Taylor, as Medoro, is so overcome by the languid ecstasy of his music that he seems to faint under the strain of delivering it.

That leaves the astounding Bartoli, whose Angelica is the very incarnation of musical romanticism. She breathes in enraptured arcs, as if she were an Aeolian harp played upon by gusts of passion. When she succumbs to terror, her bouts of frenzied coloratura are like the fountain gushing from the convulsed earth in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". Interpolating a sudden octave drop, she makes it sound as if she had plunged off a precipice. Here in person is the "Sturm und Drang" that provoked Haydn's agitated early symphonies: she has whipped up that turbulent storm and stress within her own body.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Cecilia Bartoli will perform Haydn's Armida at the Royal Festival Hall in April 2003

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