You know from one look at this CD cover - cast members wearing fish heads that wouldn't be out of place in a Monty Python episode - that comic overflow was not lacking in the 2006 Glyndebourne production by Robert Innes Hopkins and Daniel Slater at which this recording was made. Fortunately, over-the-top is just what this frothy 1946 Prokofiev confection needs. This is total escapist opera, created against the backdrop of World War II and Stalinist repression.

Set in eighteenth'-century Seville, the twentieth-century score's soundscape careens from the heavy, percussive duple rhythms familiar to anyone who knows the composer's Romeo and Juliet to pseudo-melancholy, lilting Spanish laments with serenading violins. There are love duets aplenty, a lascivious old fish-merchant, a nanny pretending to be her young charge, and monks who are three sheets to the wind. The libretto by the composer and Mira Mendelssohn, based on Richard Sheridan's play The Duenna, is often laughout-loud funny. Though the opera is at times reminiscent of Le Nozze di Figaro or Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the language and style of humor are more modern. Take, for instance, the ever-practical Duenna's retort to Louisa, the ingenue heroine, who has just expressed her disgust ("Ukh") at her father's choice of husband, Mendoza, the wealthy old fish-merchant. "Well, ugh or no ugh" ("Nu, ukh ill nye ukh"), retorts the Duenna, "Your father is stubborn," before hatching a plan for her and Louisa to outwit Don Jerome, Louisa's father, and make herself rich in the process. (It trips off the tongue better in Russian.)

The orchestra and cast don't shy away from the score's more ridiculous moments. In their drunken scene, the monks Elustaph, Chartreuse and Benedictine do so much scenery-chewing one cannot help wondering whether they knocked over any sets during the performances. The members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under Vladimir Jurowski, dig into the score with precision and gusto - tender, crashing, ironic, spiky or romantic, as the mood requires.

Vocal honors among the cast go to Lyubov Petrova, who has just the right weight soprano and girlishly sweet timbre for Louisa. She hits every note dead-on, even during those tricky Prokofiev interval jumps during recitatives; her solid rhythmic sense means that little touches such as the "Tak tak tak" and "da da da" triplets in the Act III scene at Mendoza's house sound as precisely articulated as a tongued note by a flutist. Petrova, along with the Antonio of Vsevolod Grivnov, gets to sing one of the most ravishing love duets ever written, "Moya mechta" (My dream), and it is sung beautifully indeed; the melody's opening upward octave leap perfectly captures the sky-high romantic expectations of a teenage girl. Grivnov, though he tends to push his tenor a bit, is likewise believable as Louisa's lovestruck but impoverished suitor, Antonio. As Don Jerome, Viacheslav Voynarovskiy's best moment is his utter befuddlement as he realizes bit by bit that he has been tricked. Andrey Breus uses his burly baritone well as the secondary lover, Ferdinand, Don Jerome's son, who is in love with Clara. In the latter role, Nino Surguladze has an impressively muscular and powerful mezzo, but her voice has drawbacks - an edge too hard for this refined character, words that are hard to hear and a wide vibrato that obscures Prokofiev's precise, wide-ranging vocal lines. Her forlorn Act II aria "Nye gadala ya" (I did not guess that here in this quiet retreat), in which she contemplates life as a nun, is nonetheless moving.

As the Duenna, mezzo Alexandra Durseneva is best in her seduction aria, where her covered, ultra-Russian timbre mirrors her physical veiling and disguise. During that exchange with Mendoza, she perfecdy delivers what is one of the opera's most deliciously silly phrases, "And with your beard fluttering in the wind, we shall race along die quiet streets of Seville." As the hapless schemer Mendoza, bass Sergei Alexashkin is dearly having a ball, growling, beseeching, barking, or singing his ode to fishes, and he gets some of the loudest laughs from the Glyndebourne audience. As the world-weary Don Carlos, Alan Opie sounds appropriately wistful about the follies of young love.

The packaging - an actual bound book with CDs in front and back sleeves - includes a complete libretto in English, Russian, French and German. But it lacks a Russian transliteration, making it impossible for those who can't read Cyrillic to follow the libretto closely.

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