The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s unnerving tale of man transformed into a cockroach, is a gift to a composer as imaginative as Michaël Levinas (b1949). In this short but expansively expressive opera, transformation is never one way: dramatically, dream is constantly morphing into nightmare and back, prompted by music that shifts multivalently between evocations of the Renaissance madrigal and intensely lyrical modernism. It’s vital to the success of the enterprise that such shifts never become mechanical, even though the mechanics of state-of-the art electronic manipulation are ever-present. With so much hanging on haunting, disconcertingly elemental imagery, the term ‘spectral’ has never been more appropriate for a contemporary compositional enterprise that owes a particular debt to the French pioneer of musical spectralism, Gérard Grisey.

This enthralling performance reflects great credit on the combined forces of the Lille Opéra and IRCAM at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Under the expert, dedicated musical direction of Georges-Elie Octors, the eight-strong cast of singers seems utterly assured, sustaining vocal lines which, while often simple and repetitive in themselves, mingle in intricately shifting patterns to project the drama’s hypnotically involving progress with a winning blend of spontaneity and inevitability. Even in the unusually extended (15-minute) Prologue the tension never slackens and the five ‘madrigals’ of the opera proper should serve as an intriguing test case for anyone suspecting that Kafka’s early-20th-century brand of broad-brush surrealism might be past its sell-by date.

The present format, with less-than-lucid booklet-notes and the opera’s text in French only, is not ideal. Given that productions of La métamorphose are not likely to be frequent, a DVD of what was clearly one of 2011’s major musical events would be very welcome.