As long ago as 1946, Glyndebourne premiered a work by an up-and-coming young composer. And when the company goes on tour this autumn Fiona Shaw is directing a new production of that opera – The Rape of Lucretia by one Benjamin Britten, whose subsequent works have inspired some of the house’s finest productions.

So tonight’s world premiere of Wakening Shadow shows a breadth of imagination in the way Glyndebourne has chosen to mark Britten’s centenary. The hour-long chamber opera links together original orchestrations of three of the canticles, with completely new settings of texts by Joseph Brodsky, Byron and Shelley.

The work has been composed (and the Britten orchestrated) by Glyndebourne’s 30-year-old young composer in residence Luke Styles, working closely with music director Vladimir Jurowski and emerging young director Daisy Evans, still only 25, whose own company, the awkwardly-named Silent Opera, staged an innovative and exciting L’Orfeo in London’s docklands – on which we reported earlier this year.

‘From the Canticles, we picked Abraham and Isaac, The Journey of the Magi and The Death of St Narcissus,’ Styles told me. ‘That way we could see a dramatic progression from Old Testament unquestioning belief in God, to a focus on a family unit, to a focus on the individual, with all of them being sources of divinity or the sublime. I could then compose new scenes to flesh that out into some kind of chamber opera.

‘The wakening shadow is the conception of these beliefs: the unquestioning one in Abraham and Isaac and the way that is gradually lifted or awoken from to arrive at the end at mutability where the basic message is the humanist one that we define ourselves through our decisions and our relationships to other people.’

Jurowski is conducting four performances of Wakening Shadow in Glyndebourne’s Jerwood Studio this week, using its Jerwood Young Artists and members of the chorus, with musicians from the LPO. It is typical of Jurowski’s tenure at Glyndebourne that he wanted to finish his decade-long music directorship working with his young protégé – he was involved in Styles’s selection as young composer in residence in 2011.

‘Vladimir champions the development of young artists and emerging talent and wanted to work together with me,’ Australian-born Styles told me. ‘He really invests in young talent.’

Styles, who studied with George Benjamin, has already won a number of awards and has been commissioned to write a new work for next year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

I was lucky enough to see the dress rehearsal of Wakening Shadow before Billy Budd on Saturday: Evans has used a particularly effective rope and tree set to transform the Jerwood Studio. She uses a performance space rather than a stage – anyone who saw her L’Orfeo will realise she is an unconventional director. With magical lighting to amplify the musical impact, this promises to enhance the Glyndebourne experience for those able to see it this week.

On the main stage, meanwhile, Mark Padmore made a rare operatic appearance as a tortured Vere, without the moral courage to save (as he should have) the innocent (in every way) Billy Budd. Michael Grandage’s claustrophobic and homoerotically charged production from 2010 has lost none of its power and you still want to weep for Jacques Imbrailo’s Budd. There is not a weak link in the cast and Sir Andrew Davis’s conducting adds an extra dimension to what, on a showing like this, is surely one of Britten’s most thought-provoking and remarkable works.