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Marcus Farnsworth and Susanna Hurrell in A Visit to Friends at Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

A Visit to Friends is an opera-within-an-opera, adapted from a play, which is itself based on a short story. Got it? With lineage more entangled than the family tree of a Russian novel, Colin Matthews’ debut opera spends a lot of time making simple things – love, jealousy, storytelling – complicated, while making complicated things – a slippery, time-shifting chronology, meta-theatre, the politics and power-struggles of the rehearsal room – simple. The effect is by turns beautiful and frustrating.

The starting point for cultural big-dogs Matthews (who, at 79, joked that he didn’t feel he could wait quite as long as Elliott Carter to write an opera) and novelist William Boyd was a Chekhov short story. In it we meet a young lawyer (a self-portrait of Chekhov himself) whose disaffection and cynicism keep him apart. A visit to two friends – an older woman and a younger – on their crumbling family estate prompts both reveal their love. But he sneaks away rather than commit to either.

To this, Boyd and Matthews add another layer: a contemporary rehearsal room in which three singers, a director and pianist rehearse a newly-discovered 19^th-century opera based on the Chekhov. As rehearsals progress, singers and their characters blur until the parallel lines suddenly snap.

It’s a lot to juggle, but unfolds with exemplary clarity in Rachael Hewer’s production, which pivots the two worlds on a revolve. Hewer has fun with the framing narrative, giving us some gloriously hammy 'staging' from director Gregor (the excellent Edward Hawkins), mines some well-observed humour from the pianist (Gary Matthewman) and finds a new and unexpected emotional gear for the ending.

Lotte Betts-Dean and Marcus Farnsworth in A Visit to Friends at Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

The art of libretto-writing is a dark one, as EM Forster, WH Auden, David Mitchell, Ian McEwan have all discovered. Boyd joins them with a curiously arch libretto whose heightened expression tethers rather than frees Matthews’ score. For a piece about subtext there’s a lot of explaining, and characters have a bad habit of talking about feeling things in lieu of actually feeling them. Arias tend to the philosophical, but do we really sing about abstractions? Or is it the small, domestic details that swell heaviest in Mozart, Puccini, Britten: an old coat, a memory of childhood, a lost pin?

Matthews’ score is suffused with early Scriabin – the composer, he decided, of the 'lost opera'. Matthews’ own taut lyricism is softened and perfumed by the headier sound-world, unfolding in a continuous, Wagnerian flow in which tension and deferral are layered on tension and deferral, where yearning moves towards but rarely arrives. The vocal language is charged, but both in Vanessa’s memorable 'In a dark wood' and the orchestral interludes (given exceptionally fine articulation by Jessica Cottis and the Aurora Orchestra) we get a glimpse of the opera that might have been: Matthews without the Russian mask. It’s tantalising.

Lotte Betts-Dean leads the small cast as Vanessa/Varia – a charismatic, richly-sung centre-point for the romantic revolutions and contortions of Marcus Farnsworth’s slick Marcus/Mischa and Susanna Hurrell’s brittle Nadia/Natalie. But, after 90 minutes of theatre, we’ve barely got skin-deep with these characters. Somehow, in the shortest of short stories, Chekhov has said so much more.