There is a scene in the film Amadeus, the biopic of Mozart taken from Peter Shaffer's play of the same name, where Austrian emperor Joseph II tells the young composer "too many notes here Mozart, too many notes."

It's a scene which always makes me smile but the Cosi Fan Tutte, Mozart's 15th opera and the last in his trilogy written with Da Ponte, that remark does contain a grain of truth. The music for Cosi is so ravishing, so beautiful, so heart-meltingly good and so sublime it does seem far too much for the slightness of the plot.

The story is of a bet by a cynical philosopher to two young men that if they were called away, their girlfriends would very soon be unfaithful to them.

To this end, he makes the students pretend they have been called away on military duty, but they return disguised as Albanians and profess to love each other's girl.

Plot-wise it is absurd as the action is supposed to be all over within 24 hours and in most performances the only disguise the pair of boys use is a change of hats. But in this concert performance by the English National Opera disguises don't really matter.

The opera was seen as scandalous when it was premiered in Vienna in 1790 where it ran for just five performances before the emperor died and all the theatres were closed.

The opera had a limited revival but moral codes throughout the 19th Century essentially kept the opera off the stage for more than 100 years.

Richard Strauss championed it in the early 1900s but it only really began to take off in the 1930s when John Christie used it at Glyndebourne's opening season.

I have seen it set in many guises, in the Bay of Naples as originally intended, in a Victorian garden and perhaps most memorably on a cruise liner in a spectacular Trevor Nunn production for Glyndebourne. Covent Garden did a production which was dressed by star designer Armani.

However it is done, it is always a marvellous success and was a fine way to end this year's Brighton Festival.

I came out of this concert version, sung in English to a witty translation by Jeremy Sams, floating on the cushion of magic thanks to Edward Gardner's flawless conducting and the magnificent singing of the cast who have been performing for the last few weeks at the London Coliseum.

Irish soprano Carla O'Sullivan makes for a fine and feisty Fiordiligi and fellow Irish mezzo Anne Marie Gibbons is a beautifully dreamy Dorabella, while American tenor Gregory Turay and baritone Mark Stone make a fetching Fernnando and Guglielmo.

Sussex-born-and-bred Robert Poulton is a wonderfully sly Don Alfonso and Lillian Watson makes a great ladies maid in the role of Despina.