‘In a text for music, something should be missing – and what’s missing is the music.” It’s an obvious point that Martin Crimp – playwright and librettist of Into The Little Hill – makes, but one that cuts to the dynamic relationship between words and music that is the combustible core of opera. For a genre that was declared dead at the moment Floria Tosca leapt from the battlements, opera continues to flourish with surprising persistence, and Sunday night’s double bill of George Benjamin’s Into The Little Hill and Harrison Birtwistle’s Down By The Greenwood Side provided a spirited rebuff to all those for whom the form is a quaint anachronism, with the audience’s laughter and pin-drop silence proving by turns that the power of opera is still very much alive.

Composed in 1969, Down By The Greenwood Side is Birtwistle at his most sharp and playfully English; imagine a Thomas Hardy adaptation directed by Danny Boyle circa Trainspotting, and you have some idea of the darkly self-reflexive tone of this pastoral miniature. Juxtaposing a traditional medieval mummers play with vocal interludes for solo soprano that revisit the traditional ballad of The Cruel Mother, Birtwistle creates a sort of avant-garde pantomime that somehow manages to be comically surreal, sinister and profoundly moving all at the same time. Soprano Claire Booth was responsible for much of the pathos of the piece in her achingly human rendering of the deranged mother who kills her babies.

Reliably dynamic and expressive of voice, it was the delicate vulnerability of Booth’s acting that was the real surprise here, providing a very necessary dramatic foil to the primary-coloured energy of the mummers.

Glorying even more overtly in the artificiality of the operatic form, George Benjamin’s Pied Piper re-telling, Into The Little Hill (premiered in 2007), made for an interesting companion-piece. Benjamin’s fragmented and highly textural score is neither easy nor immediately accessible, yet thanks to the technical bravura and dramatic commitment of singers Susan Bickley and Claire Booth was able to woo an over-excited audience with its pared-down beauty, despite stiff competition from the more blowsy charms of the Birtwistle. Benjamin’s pointillist textures proved the perfect medium for the gut-wrenching concision of librettist Martin Crimp, and the understated brevity of this miniature tragedy only made one long more intently for a full-scale work from this pair to fulfil the hinted-at promise of this contemporary gem. In keeping with its consumptive heroines it seems that opera intends to spin out its melodious death-throes for some time yet…