MUSIC / Overturning another miscarriage of justice: Nicholas Williams on a neglected Britten opera and the pianist Peter Serkin at the Aldeburgh Festival

In a climate of maladministered justice, attention is turning to Owen Wingrave, Benjamin Britten's penultimate, most neglected opera. Coinciding with a reissued CD of the composer's own recording with the English Chamber Orchestra and original cast, the Aldeburgh Festival is mounting two lavish concert performances, at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, that invite reappraisal.

The first of them, last Friday, could be the start of the comeback. On one level, it confirmed the general feeling that despite the limitations of its original conception as a television opera in 1970, this score is a thesaurus of musical beauties - the hidden ground between the ascetic church parables and the valedictions of Death in Venice. Nobody knows this better than Oliver Knussen, our leading Britten interpreter and conductor of the London Sinfonietta in this reading of knife-edge commitment.

His decision to place the orchestra on stage rather than in the pit paid off in the clarity of instrumental detail. There was a rich cast of soloists, including Lucy Shelton, Mary King and Jane Manning as the women of Paramore, and John Shirley-Quirk recreating his original role as Coyle from the 1973 Covent Garden staging. But the vocal hero was David Wilson-Johnson.

On the level of advocacy, this opera will survive by shedding its Sixties associations of pacifism and small-screen immediacy to show whatever dramatic potential lies behind. His anguished portrayal of Owen not as an emblem but as a true Britten suffering- and-exploited type brought conviction to the whole. Putative shortcomings of pace and ensemble disappeared in the realisation that, properly conceived, this is no period piece. True, doubts lingered over the effectiveness of the final scene, but now the proper venue for their airing is a new production.

Though a virtuoso player, Britten wrote sparingly for the piano. In contrast, today's composers have returned to an exploration of its sonorous potential, inspired by the ability of young pianists like Peter Serkin. Dedicating Saturday's concert, also at the Maltings, to the memory of his teacher, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, he gave a sequence of recent international commissions, followed up by Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Once upon a time pianists included a classical piece in contemporary recitals to demonstrate their mastery of traditional phrasing and pedalling. Serkin's Olympian command is so obvious, and so intelligently motivated that, paradoxically, it was the Goldberg that sounded most recent, simply because his searching musicality exposed it for the complex, spiritual creation that it is. One could only marvel at the prodigious mind that played it from memory. But the same technical skills that drew different colours for each strand of counterpoint, and balanced fiery pyrotechnics with limpid ornamentation, also probed the essence of Alexander Goehr's tough, proportionally generated . . . in real time I and Knussen's luminous Variations, Op 24. Whereas the precipitous speed of Goehr's argument left striking contrasts of timbre in its wake, textual identity seemed Knussen's starting point, the matrix wherein he spun his magical studies and surly passacaglia.

Harmony and tibre were reconstituted anew in Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch 1 and 2; the former with a Zen indifference to duration, feeling the silences; the latter weaving tranquil ostinatos in memory of Messiaen. Modes of time, and pitch, were the thread of the evening, which opened with Peter Lieberson's Breeze of Delight, as steady and quiet as yogic breathing in its meditation on half a dozen well-chosen notes.