A formidable obstacle faced composer Matthew Aucoin and playwright/librettist Sarah Ruhl in adapting “Eurydice,” Ruhl’s retelling of the Orpheus fantasy, for the opera stage.

How to improve Ruhl’s intimate eyesight of the underworld to the grand scale of opera without sacrificing its delicate construction, its uncanny intimacy or its surreal sense of humor?

If Tuesday night’s premiere was any indication, the response is: very easily.

“Eurydice” is a beguiling tour of the underworld and an arresting tour de drive from a composer plainly hitting his stride.

Ruhl’s 2003 play situates the doomed heroine of the Orpheus myth at its middle, pulled irrevocably in between two worlds: One particular previously mentioned, alive with her new love, in which their foreseeable future collectively awaits, and 1 beneath, in the underworld with her deceased father, where by her whole previous is rinsed absent by forgetfulness.

Her crafting is characterised by a lightness that generally belies its very own heaviness, a silliness that can transform somber with the fall of a one phrase. It is a form of emotional dexterity that directors wrestle to protect even without an orchestra chiming in.

Aucoin matches the nimbleness of Ruhl’s text throughout, with a shapeshifting score that floods the underworld – its grey stone walls the texture of burned wooden, a bleak black moon hanging in an vacant sky – with loaded, kinetic colour.

From the overture onward, Aucoin shown his eager potential to navigate between the emotional worlds of the opera, veering from haunting evocations of decline and mourning into vertiginous episodes and even a clangorous dance social gathering. Woodwinds winnow upward like flowers by means of the soil. Gnarly blasts of horns bend and plummet in ferocious glissandos. It really is an energetic, restless, stunning score…