The impossible quest has been attracting storytellers since Orpheus. Picture a Day Like This, the fourth opera by George Benjamin and his librettist Martin Crimp, features such a quest. A woman whose infant son has died is given the chance to bring him back. ‘Find one happy person in this world and cut one button from their sleeve. Do it before night and your child will live.’

A simple enough task, you’d imagine, especially as she is supplied with a list of names, but each of her encounters, although initially encouraging, reveals that happiness is barely skin deep: a pair of lovers are not quite so in love when she discovers he’s sleeping with (plenty of) other people; an artisan’s happiness turns out to be chemically induced; a young composer’s success is hollow; an art collector has bought his way to happiness and locked it in glass display cabinets, yet is not satisfied. Only when, in a garden paradise, the woman meets the mysterious Zabelle – the only named character in the opera – does she reach a sense of resolution. The ambivalent ending is enigmatic, but suggests this is another step on the journey of grieving.

The opera premiered at the 2023 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and has already been seen at the Royal Opera in London, one of six other co-commissioning houses. It’s a compact work – an hour long – and is episodic, a sequence of vignettes. We never really get to know the central character, sung by French mezzo Marianne Crebassa, while the people she meets are archetypes, however skilfully drawn.

Both music and text are restrained, but haunting and spare. There’s the sense that every phrase has been chiselled, exquisitely crafted and polished. Benjamin’s vocal lines are close to speech patterns and it’s luminously scored, shimmering and rippling, but I was left wondering – both after seeing it live and again on this audio recording from Aix – whether it is just a little too slick, a little too pleased with itself. Its dreamlike pacing and lack of variation are also a handicap, particularly on disc.

But there’s no mistaking the quality of the performances. As the Woman, Crebassa is excellent, her mezzo poised and eloquent. Anna Prohaska provides the perfect foil as Zabelle and the other cast members, taking multiple roles, all make their mark; John Brancy’s smooth baritone as the Artisan and Collector, Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi, bright-toned soprano and countertenor, as the pair of lovers and the Composer and her assistant. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, familiar Benjamin collaborators, play with pinpoint precision and colour under the composer’s baton. Even if I don’t admire it as much as Benjamin and Crimp’s outstanding Written on Skin (a high bar, I admit – 5/13), this is definitely worth hearing.