Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has provided inspiration for many composers with varying degrees of success over the years, yet Lewis Carroll’s quirky, topsy-turvy, surreal world seems to have found a perfect match in Gerald Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Premiered in 2016 in a concert performance before being fully staged last year at the Royal Opera House, music, sound, image and gesture form powerful and often disturbing alliances from the moment Alice falls through the rabbit hole at the beginning to her altercation with the Red Queen at the end.

We are introduced during the first half of the opera to many characters and strange events in Carroll’s first instalment, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the White Rabbit, Queen of Hearts, the ‘mad’ tea-party and croquet-cum-music lesson with the Queen – while the second half revolves around the elaborate chessboard game that takes up much of Through the Looking-Glass. Barry manages to illuminate this world through a powerful and arresting musical mirror image where one’s expectations are constantly thwarted, contorted, twisted and subverted.

The narrative digressions and deviations that appear in Carroll’s stories are reflected in Barry’s style and approach, which homes in on often unnoticed (or unwanted) gestures that exist on the periphery of music’s form before magnifying them to grand and grotesque proportions. These vary from the technical musical acrobatics and warm up exercises heard in the opening scene (and later, at the Queen’s croquet ground) to short connecting figures that are enlarged and repeated, such as the mock-dramatic chord sequence repeated 13 times to signal the arrival of the Queen of Hearts. Barry often mines the margins of music (both past and present) for ideas. These often arrive in strange combinations and juxtapositions – from a pastiche Lutheran chorale to crazy can-can music, Gilbert & Sullivan spoof to First World War songs, Elizabethan madrigal-meets-barbershop to Schoenbergian Sprechstimme with a dash of hip hop.

Perhaps most impressive is the way in which Barry controls the opera’s dramatic curve – not easy when the narrative’s circuitous threads are so difficult to rein in. Banal tonal moments, such as Humpty Dumpty’s interpolation of new words on to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (a lot of the opera remains stubbornly in C major), suddenly get sucked into dissonant, chaotic vortexes – extreme forearm-like cluster chords brandished by the orchestra against competing contrapuntal lines in the voices.

Soprano Claudia Boyle as Alice delivers an astonishing, mesmerising performance but credit should go to the rest of the cast, who shift constantly between prominent and ‘subsidiary’ characters – Clare Presland’s Blackadder-like Red Queen, Hilary Summers’s doleful Dormouse, Gavan Ring’s brilliantly bonkers Mad Hatter and Stephen Richardson’s quixotic White Night just some of the highlights in a performance brilliantly marshalled by André de Ridder and the Irish Chamber Orchestra that is chock-full of shocks and surprises.