This more and more becomes my joy, to make the staging work, so you can even understand the structure of the score." Anyone who saw his 1988 Falstaff, for example, will recall how simply, yet skilfully, he choreographed that final, fun-fuelled fugue so as to articulate each bubbling, bobbing, jostling vocal strand.The search for suitably theatrical scores brought him in 1992 to Debussy's Pelleas, a staging that was planned to mark Stein's operatic comeback in Paris but was ditched in the wake of Barenboim's dismissal from the Bastille, and ended up at WNO on the rebound, though with Pierre Boulez still on board. "I think it was really a gift from Mr Boulez to do the production here," says Stein. The willingness of the great composer-conductor to accompany Stein's staging on tour, appearing in the pit on wet Thursday evenings in Bristol, Birmingham and Southampton, represented a double coup for the Cardiff company. The two collaborated again on Schonberg's Moses und Aron in Amsterdam in 1995, since when Stein's only other opera has been Wozzeck in Salzburg two years ago.Given the debt Britten's opera so obviously owes to Berg's, Grimes seems a logical follow-up, though Stein insists it's coincidental.

He was originally asked to do the piece in Vienna, but turned it down, partly as the casting was already done (and he couldn't see how it could work with the given tenor), partly as he felt he could only do Grimes properly with English-speaking singers - "people who know exactly, also in a little bit an ironic way, what it is about, this weather and this rain, and this special relationship to nature and the sea, and the fighting with that, and so on." That said, he was shocked to find "how strangely English singers behave when they sing their own language, trying to ennoble it with a kind of rostrum of operatic behaviour, so that it becomes a little bit pompous, as if it would be an oratorio or I don't know what." The "plum in the mouth" style jars all the more in a work where, even if the text is sometimes overflowery and poetic, "the themes are very direct and concrete, and it's about the lives of ordinary people - fishermen, not Kings and Queens".What gives the work its "special fascination", though, is how precisely rooted it is in the soil and sea of Aldeburgh, the Suffolk fishing village where Crabbe's original poem is set, where Britten settled and founded his festival. As a self-confessed provincial ("Germany is all made up of provinces, they have no capital"), Stein particularly admires the way it draws the universal from the provincial, how one tiny dot on the map can harbour a drama of global import.Naturally, he visited Aldeburgh, but as for re-creating it on stage, forget it. "Realism in theatre is very difficult nowadays," he observes, "when you can push a button, pouf!, and have virtual reality in your own home." The answer is to isolate elements that really count - in Grimes's case, Aldeburgh's role as a fishing community. "So the only real things on board - sorry, on stage! - are the boats...

they are made in Aldeburgh, and they are my joy!"`Peter Grimes': New Theatre, Cardiff (01222 878889), 15, 20, 24 Feb (live on Radio 3); Apollo, Oxford (01865 244544), 2, 5 March; Hippodrome, Birmingham (0121 622 7486), 23, 26 March; Sadler's Wells, London (0171 863 8000), 30 March, 3 April; Empire, Liverpool (0151 709 1555), 6, 9 April; Grand, Swansea (01792 475715), 13, 17 April. PARSIFAL ENO COLISEUM LONDON IT MAY come to be known as the Protestant Parsifal; a grey day for the Grail. But Nikolaus Lehnhoff's provocative, intelligent, and finally very moving production of Wagner's perplexing masterpiece dares to ask questions for which there are no easy answers In a sense, it is the agnostic Parsifal. It wants to believe, but it needs to know.This, says Lehnhoff, is an opera about loss of faith, loss of direction, loss of humanity Loss.

The world into which it plunges us is a world in decline, a world so preoccupied with the trappings of Christianity - the symbols, the rituals, the piety that means everything and nothing - that it has forgotten the true meaning of the word Man's inhumanity to man has come full circle Our evolution has hit the buffers It's the end of the line.Indeed it is. In the final act of the opera, Lehnhoff's set designer, Raimund Bauer, presents the metaphor literally: a length of railtrack going nowhere or somewhere, depending upon which way you look at it Salvation railroad It's the lifeline, if you like, to new beginnings The way in, and the way out. It's the track along which Parsifal enters a warrior - a black samurai (a marvellous evocation from costume designer Andrea Schmidt-Futterer) - and exits a redeemer, leading the way for all those who would follow.So there is hope in Lehnhoff's wilderness. In the beginning, and in the end, time and place are indeterminate.

Different cultures, east and west, different periods, are suggested in the costume designs. The knights in act one hail from medieval times, in act three they are ghosts of the Great War, gas masks pushed back over their heads in terrible grimaces. But the sanctuary of the Grail is a constant, the steep incline of its grey walls suggesting a civilisation thrown off its axis. A huge rock - the rock of ages - has ruptured its fortification from the outside world, and through that rupture (which we might also see as a metaphor for Amfortas's wound, the wound of all humanity) the wild and wilful figure of Parsifal first bursts like a force of nature.For once he is, in every sense, the primitive. The surprise of his first entrance is but one of several tiny revelations that Lehnhoff brings to his reading of the text.