The opening production of the Glyndebourne season is one of the most prestigious dates on the international opera calendar. This year, it is a new production of Verdi’s great comedy Falstaff, a Glyndebourne speciality since the 1950s, but absent from the repertoire for almost 20 years. In the title role for the first time is the Briton Christopher Purves, a versatile, unclassifiable singer, who takes bass, bass-baritone and baritone parts. He sang Master Ford, a pure baritone role, to Bryn Terfel’s Falstaff, for Welsh National Opera last season and now gets his chance to be the star of the show in Richard Jones’s new production, opening on May 21 (general public booking begins on Saturday).

Purves is one of those singers, rare these days, who seems to have risen gradually through the ranks, rather than shot to overnight stardom, during a career resembling that of an actor rather than a singer. Like an actor, he says, he rarely duplicates roles, and he does not have the standard international opera singer’s career, travelling around with a handful of parts, endlessly repeated, in his carry-on luggage. His burgeoning reputation as an exceptional singer-actor has propelled him into the limelight at Glyndebourne this summer.

“It’s really through the auspices of Richard Jones and Vladimir Jurowski ,” he says. “We did Berg’s Wozzeck for Welsh National Opera together. I could hardly say no to Glyndebourne.”

In fact, he has said no to Falstaff before, when Welsh National Opera invited him to understudy Terfel and take over the role on tour, but, with typical intelligence and self-effacement, he preferred to sing Ford alongside Terfel and learn from one of the title role’s great contemporary exponents.

“Performing with Bryn, who knows the role inside out, is a great way to learn Falstaff. Fourteen performances of Ford and a rehearsal period with one of the great Falstaffs gave me a head start when tackling the title role.”

Purves is regarded these days as a quintessential Jones casting, but Falstaff will be only his fourth production with the controversial director. Their searing Wozzeck was one of WNO’s biggest triumphs of recent seasons, and Purves’s spivvy, leering Tony in Jones’s brilliant English touring-circuit adaptation of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci — clowns in the original, here translated into fading television comedians holding on desperately to celebrity by appearing in a sleazy bedroom farce in flea-pit regional theatres of the late 1950s — was a histrionic tour de force, both funny and creepily sinister. It is trademark Jones, in fact.

Jones is a master of black comedy, and it is typical that he found it even in two operas as different as Wozzeck and Pagliacci, both of which end in tragedy. “Richard tries to find the subversive in opera, in theatre, in life,” Purves says. “It’s not a weird delving into subtext, but a refusal to take things at face value, and it gets him into trouble with critics and audiences who only want to see what they already know.”

Purves’s admission to the front ranks of British opera singers is surprising given his early track record, which, aside from a stint in a rock band called the Wallbangers, was devoted to baroque choral music: “After Wallbangers finished in 1987-88, I went back to choral singing. I’d been at King’s, Cambridge, at the same time as Simon Keenlyside was at St John’s, and I knew I could earn a living in choral music. I ended up singing with The Sixteen, the Monteverdi Choir and the Tallis Scholars. I got the work because I had all the low notes, but my ego got the better of me and I knew I had to forge my way to the front of the stage.”

After singing a small part in a Lufthansa Festival concert conducted by Ivor Bolton, Purves was invited to audition for Opera 80 — now English Touring Opera — in the early 1990s, and landed the small but noteworthy parts of the Second Priest and Second Armed Man in The Magic Flute. He understudied Sarastro in the same opera and in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.

It is working with Jones and Jurowski that, he says, has opened his eyes and ears to the dramatic possibilities offered by music theatre: “When we did Wozzeck, I was terrified. It’s such an enormous undertaking. So you go to the person who is going to make your life most difficult — the director — and say: ‘Well, what’s it all about?’ And he said: ‘Erm, well, it’s set in a baked-bean canning factory.’ Oh, great, I thought, but how do I portray schizophrenia on stage? And he suggested a book about madness he had been reading. I think he wanted me to reach my own conclusion, which was basically if you are mad, you don't know about it. Wozzeck is driven mad because he doesn’t have the emotional capability to fight his way out of the mire that eventually consumes him. And that’s where the comedy comes in: the people who torture him are grotesque, absurd bullies, picking on the weak and vulnerable.”

So, just as Jones finds black comedy in tragedy, presumably he will be looking to reveal the darker aspects of Falstaff: “Ah, well, I think you’re going to be surprised. When we were working on Pagliacci,

Richard asked me if I’d had any thoughts on Falstaff, and I said I was having difficulty finding his dark side. He said I wouldn’t find one. There isn’t a dark side to Falstaff. Obviously, he has dark moments, when he fishes himself out of the Thames, but he bounces back. Falstaff seems to me untouchable. In Verdi’s hands, he almost becomes the god he thinks he is — a deity of comedy and laughter.”

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010