The first opera to be premiered at Barcelona’s Liceu for over a decade, Benet Casablancas’s L’enigma di Lea apparently aroused mixed feelings during its opening run, when this DVD was filmed, and watching it, one understands why. Setting a text by the writer-philosopher Rafael Argullol, it’s a complex, abstruse piece that ambitiously explores ‘the innermost facets of the human condition: instinct, pain, knowledge, love and compassion’ (as the booklet notes put it) in the form of a symbolist phantasmagoria at once lyrical, violent and transgressive, that buckles at times under the weight of its own imagery.

Central to its narrative is a vision of humanity as the prey of a savage God, ‘the burning darkness’, who, in a moment of desire, violates his own creation by raping the beautiful Lea. She, in the process, gains insight into both his terrible nature and the nature of immortality, but is condemned to wander the earth for eternity, hounded by two monstrous guards, Millebocche (‘Thousand Mouths’) and Milleocchi (‘Thousand Eyes’), who aim to prevent her revealing the knowledge she has obtained. As ‘God’s whore’, her fate is simultaneously to arouse desire and strike terror in every man she meets, while the world in which she finds herself is portrayed as a totalitarian psychiatric institution, run by the sinister yet comic Dr Schicksal. Hope comes first in the form of an encounter with Three Ladies of the Frontier, who intervene in human affairs from the edge of existence, then in a relationship with the somnambulist Ram. He has a back story of his own, having had sex with Death, as a result of which he has lost the ability to feel.

This prolix, portentous fable has its antecedents. The transgressive imagery and savage God bring to mind the malign deities of Sade, Baudelaire, Iago’s Creed in Verdi and Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, while Lea’s ceaseless wanderings as a being both desired and feared mark her out as a second Kundry. The sexual politics are murky, though: the equation of the violated Lea with Goethe’s ‘eternal feminine’, at one point, is deeply questionable. The real problem, however, is that we are dealing with symbols and ciphers rather than figures with whom we can identify, and our focus of attention consequently falls on trying to unravel the opera’s arcane layers of meaning, which paradoxically are never fully revealed. Lea divulges the secret of her knowledge to Ram during the orchestral passage that accompanies the sexual encounter that liberates them both. But that knowledge is not actually imparted to us, and Lea’s enigma remains intact until the end.

The score has moments of power and beauty. Casablancas’s atonal yet post-Romantic idiom is at times reminiscent of Berg. Textures are by turns dense and sensuously translucent: strikingly, there are concertante solos for flute and oboe, which almost function as additional, wordless voices throughout. They’re finely done here, though the instrumentalists are not credited individually. The playing is, in fact, consistently first-rate, and Josep Pons conducts with measured inexorability and a certain monumentality.

Allison Cook rises superbly to the challenges of the title-role, singing with tremendous dramatic fire, admirably secure over the often immense spans of Casablancas’s vocal lines. José Antonio López, though nicely lyrical, impresses less as Ram, for which Casablancas and Argullol must shoulder some of the responsibility, as his character and symbolic significance remain to some extent impenetrable. Xavier Sabata, on the other hand, is terrific as Schicksal, as much at home in contemporary music as in the Baroque repertory, and dominating the stage whenever he appears. Carme Portaceli’s staging, meanwhile, is hard-edged but straightforward. The multiple cages of Paco Azorín’s set unobtrusively suggest Schicksal’s world-as-institution in which the characters are trapped. The Three Ladies are androgynous Samurai warriors, and a discreetly sexy ballet, choreographed by Ferran Carvajal, accompanies Lea and Ram’s consummation of their love for each other. As a totality, I’m not sure it works, though some of it is perversely fascinating.