Just the opening bars of his chirpy first symphony confirms that

Just the opening bars of his chirpy first symphony confirms that. Yet knowing only Mozart’s boyhood opera Bastien and Bastienne, warbled on LP by a dinky pair of Vienna boys, I was totally gobsmacked by the past week’s feast of youthful operatic Mozart.
Two of his stunning boyhood stageworks have just been dusted down: La Finta Semplice at the Buxton Opera Festival, nestling beneath its glorious Derbyshire moorland backdrop, and Apollo et Hyacinthus by the newly formed Classical Opera Company at the Royal College of Music in Kensington, a quill’s throw from the Royal Albert Hall.These youthful Mozartian peccadilloes need no apologist Each is a compact minor masterpiece. The former takes its title from the piece’s principal lady (her exquisitely soaring arias sung here by Janis Kelly), a madam of means who feigns naivety in letting herself be wooed by two brothers – the one, Don Cassandro (Jonathan Best) a randy, streetwise soldier, the other, Don Polidoro (the deliciously vulnerable Paul Nilon), the real “simpleton” of the opera.Much of the fun comes from the zany shenanigans of this ludicrous double- wooing. Christopher Wood’s designs – tiresomely phallic but all in gorgeous blues and greens, with ingenious shifting perspectives – delighted the eye Aidan Lang’s witty direction was usually tight and canny. Guido Johannes Rumstadt’s conducting teased out, time and again, the exquisite skein of this bewitching score. The ensembles of Cosi peeped out in embryo; even Count Almaviva was prefigured in Best’s drunkenly philandering Cassandro – who finally wins the bird.

Simone, the batman (David Stephenson), has whiffs of Figaro potential.To cap even the delights of Buxton, the Classical Opera Company’s polished debut in Apollo et Hyacinthus proved a pearl beyond price Just nothing seemed to go wrong. Yet here was a work of staggering beauty, riddled with sweet noises like Caliban’s enchanted isle. The Philadelphia-born countertenor Lawrence Zazzo delighted eye and ear as Apollo; Ryland Angel was a pouting Zephyrus (the jealous west wind, villain of the piece), and Sarah Fox as Hyacinthus radiated presence and sang everyone off the stage. Sets (Atlanta Duffy), lighting (Bruno Poet) and direction (Olivia Fuchs) were top-rate. The backstage crew deserved an Oscar, and Father Rufinus Widl – the un-crabby Salzburg professor of syntax who furnished Wolfgang with his artfully sanitised libretto – a laurel wreath. Apollo et Hyacinthus may be the most poignant “school play” ever written.

No wonder all Vienna went nuts about the boy.Apollo et Hyacinthus runs till 31 July (0171-589-8212).Roderic Dunnett. You can see the headlines now. “Cambridge Footlights in quite good show, shock horror.” Over the years, Cambridge University’s most famous revue troupe have been almost as negatively reviewed as a new musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Footlights is a byword for everything that is most puerile and self-indulgent about student revues – all jokes about cucumber sandwiches and punting by performers in boaters and waistcoats.
The company have always got the critics’ goats. In 1959 the Daily Sketch asked: “What has happened to the Footlights? Jonathan Miller wants to be a chemist and not a theatrical cult – I back his judgement.” Three years later, the Oxford Mail reckoned that “somebody’s doused the Footlights … Two numbers, not so much sick as sadistic, are the work of John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who are responsible for a lot of the poorer material.”The reviewer in the London Evening News thought that the 1965 show “can be recommended only to the parents and friends of those taking part – very fond parents, very close friends”.

With a perspicacity that only critics can manage, he went on to predict that for the company which included Eric Idle and Graeme Garden “this will probably be the only occasion the cast can be seen on the professional stage”. Since then, the reviews have, if anything, become even more vituperative. “This show is unfocused, immature, well-produced tosh trading on its name, and these students, like most students, should shut up until they grow up,” thundered Scotland On Sunday about the 1995 offering.Which makes it all the more surprising that this year’s show, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, is not at all bad. Although containing the bodily functions sketch without which no student revue would be complete, the majority of the show exudes exuberance. There are some sparkingly energetic ensemble set pieces including a hopeless four-man acrobatic troupe who are trying in vain to conceal the rather obvious fact that one of them is a corpse Individually, the performers are strong, too. Richard Ayoade and John Oliver run through a neat dimwits’ double act. “Why do Irish people dance like this?” asks one, acting out Riverdance.

“Because they’ve had their arms decommissioned.”That’s not to say that the company aren’t aware of their sometimes baleful reputation. “There is this feeling that anything from Oxbridge gets slammed as elitist,” sighs Dr Harry Porter, the Footlights’ long-standing archivist “It’s automatic. Recently, the company went to Manchester, and I said I could write the reviews beforehand – `Why are these snooty Cambridge people expecting us to pay money to watch them?’ – and it was almost exactly that.”Oliver, too, regrets that the company has fallen victim to some class warrior-style sniping about Footlights being stuffed to the gills with Hooray Henrys and Henriettas. “One reviewer said, `these are over-paid students with names like Tamsin’, and we were killed as toffs by The Daily Star It’s unacceptable to poke at people for their backgrounds. But if the definition of privilege is being offered good opportunities, then we have to take it on the nose because it’s true.”But surely some of the slatings have been justified? “There has been valid criticism in the past that the show has been too self-reflective and navel-gazing and angled too much towards students,” admits Daniel Morgenstern, the Footlights’ treasurer and tour co-ordinator.That’s just one reason why Footlights this year have brought in an outside director, Cal McCrystal, from the innovative Peepolykus theatre company. He hopes to dispel the spoilt-brat, Bridesheady tag: “There was this image of people swigging champagne and spouting jargon like `plodge’ for the porter’s lodge,” he says.