It’s always a case of expect the unexpected with Christina Pluhar and her chameleon band L’Arpeggiata. One moment they’re Baroque, the next they’ve reinvented themselves as a world music ensemble or jazz group. But even for this genre-breaking group, this latest project is a first: an original opera composed and arranged by Pluhar herself to a Spanish libretto by poet Hugo Chaparro Valderrama.

Based loosely on the Orpheus legend, Orfeo Chamán was commissioned by Bogotá’s Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo and premiered in 2014 (a staging you can watch as a bonus feature on the bonus DVD). Valderrama weaves Greek legend together with pre-Columbian mythology for a story that sends its hero not down to the Underworld but on a shamanic journey accompanined by a nahual – an Aztec spirit guide.

Musically this project sits at the world music extreme of what L’Arpeggiata do. Much of the work is traditional music from Mexico, Venezuela and Bulgaria arranged by Pluhar, while Pluhar’s own music fuses this sound world with the familiar circling ground basses and signature clattering texture of the psaltery that characterise the group’s Baroque repertoire – simple, cyclic music in which emotion rather than structure is the focus. Act 3 features the only historical originals – a short sinfonia by Giovanni Battista Pederzuoli and an aria by Christian Ritter.

That this magpie project works as well as it does is down to performers who slip seamlessly between genres and styles. L’Arpeggiata regular Vincenzo Capezzuto is back with his androgynous male soprano, capturing the uncanny beauty of the nahual, while blind guitarist Nahuel Pennisi makes an urgent and eloquent Orpheus – surprisingly vulnerable, almost feminine in the face of Luciana Mancini’s more muscular Eurydice.

Yet it’s Pluhar and her musicians who really drive this colourful, rhythmic journey forwards, catching at ears and heels with their shimmying Latin American rhythms before stopping us short with a heartbreaking lament. It was never going to be an improvement on Monteverdi but Orfeo Chamán certainly makes for a fascinating musical commentary.