Fortunio, Grange Park, Northington, Hampshire

Pure joy at a French romantic opera

The British may flock to Bohème and Butterfly, but unknown operas risk rows of empty seats. Grange Park took a risk with the UK premiere of Messager's Fortunio. Luckily the company's clientele has a sense of adventure and trust in its music director, Wasfi Kani. They served up a full house and were richly rewarded.

Opera owes a lot to André Messager. A sort of Offenbach, Henry Wood and Hans Richter rolled into one, it was Messager who cajoled Debussy into delivering – finally – the long-gestated Pelléas et Mélisande, prised from him the orchestral interludes crucial to Pelléas's success, and conducted the triumphant premiere.

Fortunio (1907) is an artfully adapted four-act version of de Musset's romantic play Le Chandelier, a sort of Manon à la Maupassant: a shy tenor clerk (the Neapolitan Lorenzo Carola) falls for his employer's kittenish wife Jacqueline (Nat-asha Marsh), who is having a whirl-wind affair with an unscrupulous chancer captain, Clavaroche (baritone Quentin Hayes). None of Messager's characters, even the husband (Glenville Hargreaves), a jealous avocat of Molière descent, is phenomenally well drawn, but the diverting text makes enjoyable pastiches of each.

You can clock a good staging by the children, the curtain calls and the lack of loose ends. Daniel Slater's zestful enfants knew just what to do; and did it brilliantly. Every tentative gesture, sidling move and lighting tweak was sensitively plotted. Café patrons in teasing tableaux, an understated comic waiter, a charming mezzo maid (Juliette Pochin), the avocat's ridiculous posturings, and Jacqueline's bed-head dalliances all galvanised the plot and delighted the eye.

But oh, the joy of the music. Messager had the magpie ear of an Offenbach, the taste of a Charpentier, yet cannily welds set-piece ditties, continuous Wagner-Puccini recitatives, dancy neo-Renaissance interludes, a frisson japonais into one. It's disparate, but never creaks. His scoring is delicious – a searing pair of oboes; reedy clarinet ripples; offbeat flute pirouettes; floating cello and soft horns popping up like a Mozartian obbligato; and strings that sing.

The gorgeous sounds owed most to the conductor, Harry Christophers, whose baroque talents brought huge dividends: a restrained cherishing of the music; crystalline upper string phrasing; well-paced melody that welled up to surprise you from all over the orchestra; Chabrier-like textures; and a sense of through line that stopped set-piece songs becoming twee or jingoistic.

Francis O'Connor's birch-tree pillars, the gauzes fronting a stylish chorus and a beige-apricot boudoir that comple- mented the auditorium's flaking plaster were ravissant. Delights came thick and fast: Fortunio's petit maison ditty, Andre's toping song, a Bohème-like male trio, Marsh's fragrant "Je Ne Vois Rien", tinged with clarinet then horn, and a bass-oon-led song for the capable Landry (Joseph Corbett) verg-ed on vintage Charles Trenet.

To 13 July (01420 561090)