Benjamin Britten’s opera Curlew River was inspired by the Noh plays he saw on his 1956 visit to Japan, after which he asked his regular librettist, William Plomer, to adapt Sumidagawa for him. Eight years later, the opera was composed. Since it lasts only an hour and requires a highly stylised kind of performance, it has never been a favourite with regular opera houses, but it makes for excellent festival fare. The Edinburgh Festival has mounted its own production, directed by Olivier Py, which is well worth catching.

Plomer conceived it as a play-within-a-play put on by a troupe of Christian monks, led by their abbot. In East Anglia a bereaved mother crazed by grief, the Madwoman, searches on a ferryman’s boat for her lost son, and is at last consoled by the appearance of his spirit at his tomb. Britten adapted his style radically for this very un-English but irresistibly moving story, with a mere seven-strong band of monodic instruments each following its own path, like the five solo singers and small chorus (all male). He never wrote another opera like it, though the other two little operas he composed later as companion-pieces share some of its features.

With Garry Walker’s perceptive conducting, the tenor Toby Spence adapts his usual exuberance for the desperate Madwoman. Tim Mirfin incarnates the wise and kindly Abbot; William Dazeley sings the staunch Ferryman, and Neal Davies the sympathetic Traveller. They are all good to hear, and the stage-realisation is faultless.

The first of the Festival’s much-loved morning recitals at the Queen’s Hall was by the Welsh pianist Llyr Williams: not bad in Schubert’s great last sonata, the B-flat, though it hadn’t much forward impetus (which it needs) until the last two movements, but much better in some of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, op. 28 – especially those that require fleet fingers. In the slower, reflective ones, his rubato manner sounded vague and slack, letting the pulse go altogether. They love him in Wales, but he needs maturing.

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