The enhanced orchestra, the pit seeming too small to hold their number, was in great form from the very start, the overture a grand statement of its intentions, Edward Gardner’s conducting drawing from it a wonderfully fluid interpretation of Richard Strauss’s score, wholly sympathetic to the singers.

In voice, Sarah Connolly is as suited to be Octavian as any singer I have heard in the role, Janice Watson made a slowly warming fist of the Marschallin, and Sarah Tynan, though fragile at the start, hit and held all Sophie’s high notes rather well. But Connolly resembles a scrawny middle-aged man rather than an adolescent boy, and having to galumph about the stage in the jackboots and pseudo-silver armour of a pantomime knight, and worse, her own dowdy and unfashionable hair, did not serve her interpretation well.

This is a comedy of a boy whose voice has not yet broken but whose busy libido has been awakened by a woman old enough to be his mother — he is a Cupid of 14 rather than the hobbledehoy of 17 suggested by the programme, and theirs is the classic situation of the schoolmistress taking a precocious third-former to her bed. Sophie too should be 14, betrothed to Baron Ochs, old enough to be her grandfather. And this is Vienna in the 18th century when and where such things were possible. The children having fallen in love, the Marschallin discards Octavian for lonely middle age, and Ochs loses Sophie, departing with his devoted bastard servant Leopold for boorish pastoral delights. A happy ending, more or less.

Much of the opera is played for laughs of which John Tomlinson’s Ochs is the Falstaffian butt. He has the voice of an old leather bellows, but acts the oaf well, interpreting Ochs as so sexually omnivorous that, had he had his intended way with Mariandel (Octavian cross-dressed), discovering her to be a him would not have interrupted the proceedings. His relationship with Leopold suggests something of the Earl of Rochester’s celebrated buggering of his page.

To my great relief, the setting, though crude, is vaguely Viennese and, though in detail it drifts from 17th-century affectation to dreadful Edwardian coiffures, is rooted in between — this is not an opera for modern dress and Tooting. Crowd scenes are, as usual, brilliantly contrived, with convincing details among sweeping movements, and vignette roles are far better sung than is usual at ENO. Kinder costumes for Octavian and a formal wig might edge this into being a triumphant production.

I have only one serious note of dissent: it was with anger that I recognised a live Congo African Grey parrot on the Marschallin’s levee, the cage cruelly small: parrots are distressed by clamour and harsh lights — RSPCA take note.

Tomorrow, 5,30pm. In rep until 7 June (0871 911 0200, www.eno.org).