Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans, just turned 79, was a close associate-cum-student of Henri Pousseur and the composers around him in Liège. The regular support of his country’s leading opera company La Monnaie and of recording companies has enabled several Boesmans operas, often based on classic plays – Reigen (Schnitzler), Wintermärchen (Shakespeare, including a whole act accompanied by a jazz/folk group) and Julie (Strindberg) – to make an impact in Europe.

Au monde, his latest (2014), is a setting of a play by the contemporary French author/director Joël Pommerat. In the CD’s booklet-note the composer supplies a pithy summary of his work: ‘Just as Chekhov is a distant model for Joël Pommerat, early-20th-century French opera is a model for me. My music is of course not that of Debussy, yet elements of the prosody will make one think of it.’

Like Pelléas et Mélisande too, dramatically much in Au monde happens internally and mentally – but little in terms of visible, epic drama. The enclosed family of a wealthy industrialist – the old father, three daughters and one husband, two sons and a mysterious ‘femme étrangère’ played by an actress – are meeting to decide who will take over the family business. Issues are raised about the identity of the youngest daughter (Fflur Wyn) and about the presence of the ‘foreign woman’ who speaks another language, sings verses (with a male voice in English) of ‘My way’ and is perhaps murdered by Ori, the only named son who is going blind but will inherit the business. All this woman’s scenes carry the stage direction ‘this may be a dream of the second daughter’, the most extended role vocally and a kind of narrator or Everywoman manquée (Patricia Petibon).

Boesmans’s music is quite lush and essentially tonal, although harmonically it suggests a good ear for later 20th-century musical grammar. Scenes are linked, again Pelléas-like, with little interludes (or codas and introductions), many with an inventive range of orchestral colour. Vocal lines lie naturally for each character and are crucial in maintaining a pulse where there might have seemed a lack of narrative flow. The score of Au monde is a fluent vehicle for its economically told symbolic story. The two live performances edited down here present a well-organised and comfortably recorded reading of the opera by the committed cast.