Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings Concert Hall/ Aldeburgh Church/Bentwaters Airbase, Aldeburgh

A dark drama dressed up as playground prurience

Deceit triumphed over Truth, Pleasure was largely absent and, far from moving inevitably onwards, Time often seemed to stand interminably still during the double bill with which the 55th Aldeburgh Festival opened last weekend. Gerald Barry's Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, created a decade ago for television, comes to the stage for the first time, coupled with excerpts from Handel's oratorio Triumph of Time and Truth, at Snape Maltings Concert Hall.

Both are peopled by allegorical figures, though Barry, an admirer of Handel's brilliance and virtuosity, shakes the morality tale inside out within the earlier composer's dramatic framework. Each piece requires versatile singers of the greatest stamina, and without exception these performers deserve all possible credit for the way they rise to the extraordinary demands of both works, particularly the manic pace, vocal contortions and brittle rhythmic patterns that mark out Barry's characteristically hyperactive score.

But while there is much to admire musically, patience is tried and enjoyment severely curtailed on both sides of the interval by the desperate contrivances that director and designer Nigel Lowery imposes on the two halves of the evening. The Handel, sung in Italian (both works are surtitled) would have worked better as a prologue simply in concert performance. The three male singers, who were complemented in real depth of tone and feeling by Gillian Keith as Beauty, needed no help in conveying the emotional tensions between Handel's characters, their psychological exploration and motivation.

Barry's all-male opera, on the other hand, with its dramatic uncertainties and ambiguous take on questions of "ageing, vanity, illusion, fear, wit, ecstasy, regret and yearning" is open to all sorts of interpretation. Given the speed of musical events and excessively rapid speech in Barry and Meredith Oakes's surreal scenario, a less frenetic production would surely have captured the work's uncompromising inventiveness in a more seductive way.

The multi-purpose setting, the action enclosed beneath strip lighting in an oblong box with flaps, shutters, mirror and tiresome black coffin, caught the atmosphere of neither work. Both productions were costumed in pigtailed, schoolgirl/boy uniforms from beneath which puerile fantasies erupt in the Barry with the repetitiveness and repulsiveness of adolescent pustules. Ideas trudge rather than fly past, genuine shafts of wit are rare, and the notion that spattered blood and smeared excrement are sensationalist rather than plain silly sums up the paucity of ideas. Within such a limited range of stylistic references, one inevitably becomes disengaged from the negative aspects and dark destructiveness that lie at the core of the opera. The five dauntless singers (Pleasure, Time and Truth or Counsel from the Handel staying in the same roles), with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group bringing an appropriately anarchistic edge to their accompaniment, were assertively conducted by festival director, Thomas Adès.

In the Brodsky Quartet's morning concert in the tranquil setting of Aldeburgh Church, another strand of this year's festival was explored: Britten and Vienna. It's a missing link, of course, since Britten wasn't allowed to study with Berg, but Alexander Goehr is directly linked to the Second Viennese School through his father, who studied with Schoenberg. Between Britten, Webern and Zemlinsky, the Brodskys were joined by Tom Poster for a warmly expressive first performance of Goehr's Piano Quintet. The Brodskys brought exactly the textural clarity and graded dynamics and tone-colours that are so essential in Goehr's intensely argued, abundantly lyrical idiom. It was difficult to follow every intricate detail of structure and counterpoint in this challenging but accomplished Quintet, but it's a work that demands and will surely receive repeated airings.

Performances and installations in the bracing sea breeze on the shingle at Aldeburgh have a unique quality, but few performances create such a frisson as Yannis Kyriakides's conSPIracy cantata. Driving across an empty landscape and miles of fencing to the eerily deserted Bentwaters Airbase is a little like entering a world of James Bond-style explosive mission. Kyriakides's hauntingly enigmatic electronic piece, littered with references to military and intelligence communication, was given a compellingly claustrophobic performance in the grey and windowless Debrief Centre. In a backless evening dress and sinister black glove, Marion von Tilzer attacked the strings of the piano with a determination that would have cracked all but the most stubborn of codes. And vocalists Ayelet Harpaz and Stephie Buttrich gave a chilling and decidedly Delphic account of numbers, words and phrases, which would surely have baffled any spy covertly tuning in.

Aldeburgh Festival continues to 23 June (01728 687110). 'The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit' is at Almeida Opera, London, on 27 June, 1, 2 & 4 July (020-7359 4404)