The BBC Singers Centenary Concert was toe-curling

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known.

As it should be: this is a small opera that makes a bigger and darker impression each time you see it. It’s now scored for a chamber ensemble and just four singers, and it’s astonishing how much depth and meaning Weir finds in the simplest of sounds – how unerringly she seems to find the soul of each instrument, and the precise amount of space and weight to give to each word of Tieck’s gnomic text. There’s never any sense of strain, or of music trying to carry more drama than it will bear.

Yet somehow Blond Eckbert creates a universe that’s pregnant with meaning: German romanticism in all its wonder, richness and horror. Norton-Hale’s production finds its centre immediately; we see pine-clad mountains and mist swirling through the forest. But Eckbert (Alex Otterburn) and his wife Berthe (Flora McIntosh) are a modern couple in a minimalist home (the designs are by Eleanor Bull) that serves both as shelter and trap. A bird – Aoife Miskelly, singing and moving with bright, knowing alertness – perches on the roof, the only character to address the audience directly. Walther, the outsider whose entrance unravels this idyll, is played by William Morgan, a tenor with earth in his voice and a knack of suggesting the uncanny even when he’s sitting still.