A great knight at the opera

Hot on the heels of its revivals of Phyllida Lloyd's pioneering Gloriana and Deborah Warner's searing Wozzeck, Matthew Warchus's new Falstaff is another landmark production for Opera North, and a sure-fire triumph.

Launched (as the others were) by the company's outgoing musical director Paul Daniel, with designs by Laura Hopkins (fresh from WNO's The Rake's Progress) and perceptively lit by Peter Mumford, the first night performance, as beautifully paced and shaded as it was full of zest and aplomb, put nary a foot wrong. The opening alone set the tone for the evening: Falstaff gradually revealed, back-of-stage behind gauze, scratching nefarious epistles to his twin would-be conquests, over which Daniel unleashes Verdi's 10- second opening flurries like a firecracker. Scene 1 never once lost pace from beginning to end.

Falstaff is not only late, great Verdi, but already in the 1890s anticipates musically the 20th century. You sense Puccini on the way, as surely as you hear retrospectively those whiffs of Berliozian woodwind, the bursts of Gabrielian brass that peppered Verdi's Requiem, or the sheer range of Shakespearian dramatic invention that the nigh-on 80-year-old composer fished out of the cupboard of his genius.

Arrigo Boito's meticulously well-judged adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, with shrewd extra filching from Shakespeare's Henry plays, was a key to Falstaff's success. A weak translation, like faulty pacing, could easily derail it, or shear it of much of its almost Mozartian finesse. Amanda Holden's rhythmically alert version, with just enough earthiness and licence (there were numerous laughs, none of them cheap), scores time and again: the way Verdi's anapaestic "dalle due alle tre" - the time of Falstaff's plotted assignation with Mistress Ford, and a source of exquisite comic wit and mimicry, in the score - is preserved in (the equally plausible) "from Eleven to Twelve" is a positive joy. Just occasionally a dark vowel or heavy accentuation gave pause to the singers; the men's enunciation was impeccable, the women and final chorus, less so.

But it was the pauses proper - where Warchus's direction (compare his The Devil Is an Ass for the RSC) and Daniel at the helm allowed the frivolities to be stayed and a genuine tension to build up in silence - that most did justice to Verdi's comic genius. Above all, it allowed Andrew Shore's Falstaff, an unusually mature performance of wonderful timing and finesse which towered over this production, to triumph. Shore seems equipped with both natural talent and as fine a memory for precision of tiny detail as Warchus himself, who rarely allows an untidy gesture to creep on-stage. Falstaff's age and indispositions were beautifully pitched and observed; the Malvolian revelation of the vain becapped dandy was as hilarious as Verdi's nostalgic aria recording Falstaff's faded boyhood memories was Schmerz-laden. The piazzale, or street scene outside the Garter Inn - arguably the finest of Hopkins' beautiful, indeed almost beatific, settings (as much Mantua as Windsor), with its frothing jug thrust through a hatch and variously sidling observers - was a visual classic.

There were other performances to savour. The brilliantly tricky nine- part male-female ensembles that terminate Act 1 were as well managed as the cluttered forest scene (ingeniously revealed by swung set) was incongruously clumsy. Robert Hayward imbued Ford with a striking vocal power and believable jealousy, thinning only near the end. Paul Wade and John Hall carried off Bardolph and Pistol like a pair of old pros. Of the women, chief honours to mezzo Frances McCafferty, a Mistress Quickly panting almost as much as the sweating Falstaff himself. (Shore's line about her being his "Mercury" was one of the few he threw away.)

Belaboured by less sure diction, only the occasional aria from Rita Cullis and Yvonne Howard as Falstaff's intended targets (their garish Van Eyck- hued attire - ubiquitous even in nocturnal snow-landscape - seeming better suited to Chabrier's L'Etoile) managed to cut much ice. The love duets were charmingly carried off by Margaret Richardson and Paul Nilon - no great shakes as actors, but Nilon adding a marked pathos, likewise captured by Stephen Briggs's wittily clad, appealingly sung Dr Caius.

The orchestra proved heroic, with oboe obbligato, off-stage brass and much of the upper string playing worth singling out.

Further performances: tonight, Mon, Wed, then 29 and 31 Jan at Leeds Grand Theatre (0113-245 9351), then on tour to Norwich, Sunderland, Nottingham and Manchester