Something to shout about Nixon

Watching (and loving) Peter Sellars's original 1987 production of Nixon in China, brilliantly polished up and now newly adapted to the ENO (and economy), I am surprised by how closely it's modelled on French baroque opera.

Well, America and France share much culture and history - and this first opera, based solely on a public relations triumph, is equally an American take on the bizarrely comic folly of ideologies.

But it's from the French tradition that its grand entries come, the arrival of the Presidential Boeing, the descent of Mao from a trompe l'oeil door in his portrait. Its endless recitative, which just occasionally gets as melodic as Gluck, is very French.

So is having a ballet in the middle act, though Mark Morris's delicious Red Army Faction choreography is in the tradition of Balanchine's Stars and Stripes. John Adams's modified minimalist music is Gallic too, mixing recycled Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Handel and Bach with Messiaen-like naivety and colourfulness.

Kissinger in false eyebrows is the villain in the revolutionary ballet (with terrific American dancers Christopher E Anderson and Sonja Yun-Mi Kostich). Richard and Pat Nixon, as well as Madame Mao, are drawn into the action, just as Lully and Rameau liked to have a King Louis on stage to add class.

Alice Goodman's provocative libretto is the most poetic opera text since Quinault and Metastasio. If the scoring of John Adams's atmospheric, absorbable music were revised (by Jonathan Dove?) voices wouldn't need amplifying. ENO's sound system homogenises their effect. Adams's song is at best stepped arpeggios, not tunes.

Yet what fantastic, thought-provoking, sophisticated and witty operatic theatre it makes, absolutely unmissable. It may be an operatic dead-end like Carl Orff's Antigone, but it stirs the imagination. ENO lavish care and co-operation on it, providing Sellars in his two principal females (Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon and Judith Howarth as Madame Mao) with even stronger performances than in his original cast.

James Maddalena as Nixon is as uncanny a carbon as he was 12 years ago. David Kempster and Robert Brubaker do Chou and Mao proud. Paul Daniel as conductor keeps his hand resolutely on the controls of Adams's orchestral wall of sound, which blissfully dilates into some remarkably beautiful, expressive instrumental solos.