One may expect the Aldeburgh Festival to open with something big, something new or something upbeat, but this year the mood proved somewhat different: a rather dark-toned concert in the main hall of the Maltings, followed by a distinctly far-out one-act chamber opera in the smaller Britten Studio. The result was an interesting evening, but not one to lift the heart or set the pulses racing.

The concert book ended Bernstein with Britten in music composed under the shadow of war, matching the rather flat-footed melodrama of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem against Bernstein’s febrile, haunted Age of Anxiety, its solo piano part played here with headstrong virtuosity by Cédric Tiberghien. Lighter relief was provided by Britten’s erotic song-cycle Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, eloquently sung by Robert Murray, in a busy new orchestration by Colin Matthews that seemed to gild the lily.

John Wilson conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with conviction; James Horan (cor anglais) and Mark O’Keeffe (trumpet) shone in Copland’s melancholy miniature Quiet City.

The new opera To See the Invisible is composed by Emily Howard, a former chess champion and mathematician, to a libretto by Selma Dimitrijevic. Based on a Kafkaesque parable by Robert Silverberg, it tells the story, in 11 scenes, of a nameless man condemned on account of his cold-heartedness (of which there is no evidence) to be publicly and privately ostracised for a year – a sentence which ultimately drives him to a mental breakdown that teaches him the necessary lessons in love.

It’s intended as a moral tale both absurd and unsettling, as reflected in a collagiste score made up of disconnected fragments embracing abrupt percussive explosions, everyday banalities, direct quotations (including an Elizabethan lute song and ‘Soave sia il vento’ from Così fan tutte), and extreme atonality in the clichéd form of grotesque screeching pyrotechnics for soprano.

In many respects, it’s a throwback to modernist experiments made by the likes of Birtwistle, Kagel and Ligeti in the Sixties, but Howard’s idiom has a cool confidence and clarity of its own. Given its over-extended 90-minute duration, it is unlikely to have broad appeal. Nevertheless, I found it oddly compelling, not least because of Dan Ayling’s impeccable white-plastic staging and pitch-perfect performances by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Richard Baker and a crack ensemble of seven singing actors led by Nicholas Morris and Anna Dennis.

Until 11 June; the Aldeburgh Festival runs until 24 June. Tickets: 01728 687110