Soviet Russia ruined Prokofiev's life but inspired his most comic, and lyrical, music

In 1936, homesick despite the rewards of his life as a cosmopolitan virtuoso, Prokofiev returned to live in the country he had sarcastically nicknamed Bolshevizia. The decision ruined his life: he was hounded by cultural bureaucrats until 1953, when he died on the same day as Stalin (which must have been a sourly ironic consolation). But repatriation did wonders for his music. As a young man, he specialised, as he said, in "various degrees of the scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery". Now his doubts and torments gave him a sense of tragedy, audible in the Sixth Symphony, with its searing allusion to a redemptive motif from Wagner's Parsifal, or in the bereaved lament of the woman who searches a corpse-littered battlefield in his score for Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.

Prokofiev's Soviet works are about lyricism under duress. The lovers in his ballet Romeo and Juliet are menaced by courtiers who dance in their armour, stamping to enforce their authority; the plangent dream of Natasha in his opera War and Peace is curtailed by the abrupt announcement of Napoleon's invasion. The same disparity between the brash noise of society and a private, sensual music that we seem to overhear runs through the comedy Betrothal in a Monastery, being given a fine new production at Glyndebourne. In one episode, that confidential idyll is neither heard nor seen: a crusty, envious merchant peeps through a keyhole at two entwined lovers and translates their joy into a series of envious, guttural groans. The opera is set in Seville, and Prokofiev extracted its most tender and ardent music for a suite he called "Summer Night". Entrenched in the icy north, he dreamed of the south, with its warm, propitious darkness and its amorously breathy breezes.

Prokofiev placated his political overseers by underlining the satire on commercial skulduggery that he found in his source, Sheridan's 1775 farce The Duenna. In a jaunty ballad, the foreign fish merchant Mendoza describes his disbursement of capital to acquire a fleet of barges that will secure his monopoly of the trade. His snobbish ally Don Carlos wishes they were buying and selling guns, not smelly fish: the opera's first performances were delayed when Russian theatres closed during the war against Hitler. But Prokofiev's interest lay elsewhere - in the serenades, whispered trysts and nocturnal assignations of his four young lovers. Louisa, pining in Mendoza's house, complains that she is bored, with time at a standstill. The gently rocking sounds that steal from the orchestra pit cancel out her complaint: what she calls tedium is the enchantment of music, suspending time and reprieving us, temporarily at least, from history.

At Glyndebourne, the conductor Vladimir Jurowski relishes such delicate moments, though he also does justice to the opera's zanier spasms, such as the much-interrupted oompah-pahing rehearsal of the on-stage band in Don Jerome's house, or the final exultant patter song, with a tinkling obbligato tapped out with a spoon on a line-up of wine glasses. The cast, mainly Russian, is excellent. As the fishy Mendoza, Sergei Alexashkin has fortunately shed the anti-Semitic nose he wore for the 1997 Kirov production; Lyubov Petrova's Louisa is bright and perky, but can't compete with memories of Anna Netrebko, who at the Kirov was the bottled essence of a duskily enticing summer night. Daniel Slater and Robert Innes Hopkins, director and co-designer, organise a good deal of irrelevant bustling and mugging, with just one astonishing coup when the shady convent garden suddenly discloses its cellarage. The floor lifts up, and a gang of roistering monks swarms out of the basement to celebrate a drunken rite in the company of the holy brothers' floozies. The stunt exposes the insecurity of the musical reverie with which Prokofiev solaced himself. Above ground, all is balmily melodious, promising the resolution of discords and a happy ending; just below the surface gapes the grunting, intemperate abyss.

Prokofiev's earlier opera The Fiery Angel, directed by the incorrigibly mediocre Francesca Zambello, turned up a few days later to open the Bolshoi's season at Covent Garden. It ends, similarly, in a nunnery: the visionary Renata, deranged by her intercourse with a demon, interns herself there, but instead of piously repenting she stirs up an orgy, and is condemned to death by the Inquisitor who comes to exorcise her. Zambello has chosen to ignore the mad spirituality of the story, so she changes the nunnery to a mental asylum. Renata ought to embody the Dionysian frenzy of music, which shrieks, wails and cackles in Prokofiev's insurgent orchestra. On this occasion, frumpily acted and sloppily sung by Tatiana Smirnova, the character resembled an addled housewife fed up with her domestic chores. Despite Renata's distraction, Smirnova kept her eyes on the conductor as devoutly as if he were her therapist. Her trust in Alexander Vedernikov was misplaced: the score is crazy, but it shouldn't sound chaotic.

Zambello the feminist rescues Renata from her persecutors and sends her heavenwards in a neon-lit lift, while the drab tenement designed by George Tsypin splits apart to reveal seraphim perched on jagged, cantilevered ledges. For exactly one minute, the spectacle made me forget the sad inadequacy of the Bolshoi performance. Hydraulics, however, are no substitute for musical sublimity.

Prokofiev's "Betrothal in a Monastery" is at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, East Sussex, to 25 August. For booking and further details log on to: www.glyndebourne.com

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