After 30 years, and many spirited resuscitations of operatic rarities, the Buxton Festival is now waving the flag for Albert Lortzing and his 1842 hit, Die Wildschutz, or The Poacher. It's a tall order. Lortzing himself said that his 13 comic operas belong “among goods of middling order”. The Poacher is no forgotten Figaro, though the story, involving predatory aristocrats and wily peasants, satirises the same social order. Lortzing's mellifluous music, echoing Schubert and pre-echoing Sullivan (to British ears, anyway), is instantly pleasing - but just as instantly forgotten.

Nevertheless, this was a man - actor, singer and composer - who was born and bred in the theatre (before dying in poverty, also in true thespian fashion, just before his 50th birthday). And he poured all that stagecraft into The Poacher, which zooms along like a well-oiled farce. It involves a short-sighted schoolmaster accidentally shooting one of his master's deer (except that it turns out to be his own donkey), the usual double-cross-dressing shenanigans, and - rather daringly - a Count falling for his long-lost sister and a Countess for her long-lost brother. Added to this improbable mix is a duet for two men playing billiards. Even Mozart, that billiards fanatic, never wrote one of those. And there can't be many operas in which the leading soprano makes saucy jokes about Kant.

Patrick Mason stages all this, in his own lively English adaptation, with unpretentious cheerfulness inside Joe Vanek's simple village-green set. The small chorus could be crisper, but when the lecherous Count decides to hold a waltzing competition with the village maidens, they leap and lurch with a wonderfully manic intensity.

And the same light-touch humour pervades the principals' performances. James Rutherford holds the show together as the bumbling schoolmaster, and sings the opera's most celebrated number - an extended bass aria that goes from Rossini-like patter to proto-Wagnerian declamation - with verve. As Gretchen, the young nymph to whom he's engaged (but quite willing to flog to a passing Baron), Laura Parfitt projects chirpy vicacity.

Ashley Holland, Benjamin Hulett, Judith Howarth and Imelda Drumm make a suitably eccentric bunch of aristocrats - all could have strayed from the pages of Wodehouse or Waugh. Everyone's words are crystal-clear. And in the pit Andrew Greenwood keeps this rustic score humming along merrily.

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