What links Mozart, Berg and Michel Van der Aa? Well, not a lot perhaps, apart from the chance programming by the Barbican in one week of productions which sought, in some way, to challenge our pre-conceptions of a work or a genre. We enter a concert hall with expectations, but when events are slightly out of joint, we see things a little differently. 

The first production, an evening called 'Liebestod' given by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, begins with Alban Berg prowling around the stage. He hovers by the piano, drinks red wine, glares at the orchestra (who are playing a string arrangement of Wagner's Tristan Prelude) with a grimace which manages to embody both contempt and obsession. This neatly paves the way for what follows.

Berg's Lyric Suite was written in 1925-6, though it was only much later – 1977 – that the discovery of an annotated score revealed the work to be an abstract expression of his relationship – or rather obsession – with a married woman. It was, says the director Pierre Audi, ‘an illicit fantasy relationship which never happened – it is a very personal work’. And Audi here presents the work entirely in that context, the music interspersed with a script created from 14 letters Berg sent the object of his obsession, as well as letters to her husband, and text from Baudelaire, whose words also inspired the Suite.

The character of Berg as presented here by Dutch actor Jeroen Willems is somewhat grotesque, and while this intrigues, it also dictates that we here see the Lyric Suite overwhelmingly as the musical embodiment of a destructive and disturbing obsession – whatever impression the music might otherwise have left us with, and however excellently it was played. Thus the production adds and subtracts from the work – the context is convincingly conveyed, but the music compromised. But then perhaps to view it as a performance of the original work is a mistake: it’s more an exploration of it.

The thematic element of complex communication was echoed in the evening’s second half, Up-close, a new work by Dutch composer (and film-maker and director) Michel van der Aa for cello, ensemble and film – or as its composer put it ‘a film opera for cello and ensemble’.

On film we see an elderly woman wandering across a stage devoid of musicians, while soloist Sol Gabetta performs live to one side: the music (and movement in moments) sometimes separate, sometimes interacting with the film. Gabetta tackles the score and its often riveting urgency with a drama that becomes as much physical as musical, an effect enhanced by her integration into the direction of the entire piece. It is a striking visual effect that lingers longest: Gabetta leaping up, propelled forward, in unison with the actor on screen. I think Up-close would benefit from being even more so, a greater proximity creating an even stronger sense of absorption into this unsettlingly strange stage world of broken barriers and inverted norms.

So what does all this have to do with Mozart's Magic Flute, staged a week later in the Barbican Theatre? Veteran, and iconic, director Peter Brook has called his production ‘A Magic Flute’ – the dilution of the definite article a hint at the licence he felt he needed to explore the opera with sufficient creative freedom, to transcend the genre's ‘institutions’ and ‘systems’. So here we have the score reduced to piano, the singers reduced to seven, the set to a stage full only of moveable bamboo canes. Reduced too are the voices – to a human level, even the Queen of Night’s aria becoming an impassioned plea of a desperate, vulnerable person rather than an epic expression of manipulative power.

Brook writes that the production 'derives from this desire to become closer and closer to Mozart'. And – with the greatest respect for every ‘conventional’ Mozart performance I’ve seen and loved – I think with his intimate, tender and movingly human Magic Flute, he has managed that. I listened to a recording of the unadulterated original shortly afterwards, and the full orchestra and powerful singing shocked like an intrusion, an almost unwelcome dragging away from the delicate intimacy Brook had created. But don’t worry, Davis, Harnoncourt, Mackerras, Jacobs et al – I’m sure it’s only temporary, that things will soon revert back to their expected norms.