Oberon and Euryanthe, the final instalments of the Festival's Weber cycle, are both flawed operas with Shakespearean associations. Oberon, his last completed score, places the greatest music Weber ever penned at the service of the most ramshackle libretto imaginable - a sprawling, sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Oberon and Titania become embroiled with a further quartet of human lovers.

The versification is dreadful, most notoriously the immortal words "O transport!" uttered by the shipwrecked heroine on sighting a boat. Even though the Iraq war gives it contemporary resonance - the setting is Baghdad - the jolting plot twists and the emphasis on effect rather than psychology, have led to endless questions about its viability.

Yet Scottish Opera's performance, the company's last before its chorus is disbanded, was magnificent. Richard Armstrong conjured genuine magic from the score. The playing and choral singing was exceptional. Elizabeth Whitehouse was the powerful, aristocratic Rezia and Barry Banks the mercurial yet troubled Oberon, while Jane Irwin and Garry Magee were the best Fatima and Sherasmin imaginable.

Euryanthe, meanwhile, derives from the same source as Cymbeline, though it bypasses the play, which was a huge mistake. Apart from the wicked Eglantine, the one character who has no Shakespearean equivalent, the characters are ciphers. The performance, with David Robertson conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony and the Festival Chorus, was fine. Christine Brewer's Eglantine was powerhouse stuff, while Gabriele Fontana and Stewart Skelton managed to inject some sort of vague life into Euryanthe and Adolar. Even they, however, couldn't disguise the fact that the opera itself is inert and lacking in inspiration.