Euryanthe, Glyndebourne Festival, Glyndebourne

The age of chivalry is not so much dead but dying in Richard Jones's vivid new staging of Weber's Euryanthe. But its music lingers on. The overture – which opened the door wide enough for Wagner to march straight through – is just about all we hear of the piece nowadays. The libretto, by Helmina von Chezy, is generally agreed to be the culprit. Grand ambitions drive a plot strongly redolent of Cymbeline towards a feeble, all's-well-that-ends-well ending. Richard Jones is having none of that.

With a flourish, Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment despatch the overture's vaulting opening theme – cocky and confident, with its own in-built fanfares. The sound is big and wholesome, well bedded in resolute cellos and basses and burnished with brassy natural trumpets and horns. The marvellously atmospheric middle section in pale, vibrato-less strings sees a front cloth slowly unfurl to reveal an apparition of our heroine such as we might see in one of those fanciful illustrations of medieval tales. Indeed, Weber's overture conjures up many such images – images you can be sure Richard Jones will subvert when the curtain rises.

And he does – with great cunning. He and his designer, John Macfarlane, have taken elements of those lavish illustrations, but drained them of colour and romance. We're left with the dusty remnants of a dying age. Anti-romantic, anti-chivalrous. Make love, not war, is the message given out at the start – indeed, the hero Adolar carries what looks to be a broken lance, a spike, which as the plot thickens dominates the stage, impaling anything and everything in sight to create a forest of surreal giant cacti. As ever, the darker fantasy preoccupies Jones. The darkest secret at the heart of the plot – the suicide of Adolar's sister, Emma – brings its most beautiful and unsettling image: the representation of her ghost as a giant mask, bleeding from the mouth. Standing high on its brow, the vulnerable figure of Euryanthe unwittingly betrays her lover's trust.

Unsettling, too, is the fact that the set is in a constant state of transformation, moving slowly from left to right – an oppressive, ever-shifting, Turneresque sky cloth and a series of withered trees. The movement still needs work: messy black masking and frantic stagehands are clearly visible. But the idea is a strong one – certainly stronger than anything the libretto throws at us. Like the monster sent to torment Adolar and Euryanthe in Act III which Jones, in another flash of inspir-ation, depicts as a giant manifest-ation of Adolar himself: huge body, tiny head. Point taken.

But if the dramaturgy needs all the help it can get, the music soars. A dazzling, well-unified sequence of bravura numbers proves a huge advance on the singspiel character of Der Freischütz. The Glyndebourne Chorus, excitingly blocked by Jones, is a real vocal and physical presence. John Daszak conveys at least the brawn of Adolar, and Stephen Gadd (Lys-iart), stepping in at short notice, bravely goes where his voice cannot in a role written too low for him.

The women triumph. Lauren Flanigan hurls everything she's got and more into Eglantine's venomous coloratura, while Anne Schwanewilms as Euryanthe is a natural stage star. Her great quality is an ethereal stillness. She brings to the role a lieder singer's inwardness and attention to fine detail, but the voice is possessed of a thrilling reach, too. There will be no happy ending for this Euryanthe – Jones makes that patently clear – and the only hero isMark Elder, whose fervent belief in this score is palpable.

To 22 Aug (01273 813813). A concert version will be performed at the BBC Proms on 12 Aug & broadcast live on Radio 3 (020-7589 8212)