With Gerard Mortier at the helm, the Teatro Real de Madrid is going from strength to strength. Iolanta, a one-act opera, is an awkward length (extended here, as we shall see): it was originally performed with The Nutcracker but Peter Sellars has instead imaginatively paired it with Stravinsky’s ‘melodrama’ Perséphone.

Like many other operas, Iolanta is concerned with the transition from darkness to light: a tale of a princess who has been brought up in ignorance of her blindness. Ibn-Hakia, the Moorish physician, tells King René that his daughter can gain her sight provided she wills her cure: entailing, of course, her coming to understand her condition. It’s a stranger, the Burgundian prince Vaudémont, who unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag; and it’s their mutual love that enables Iolanta to see at last. Rimsky-Korsakov found the opera ‘one of Tchaikovsky’s feeblest compositions’: lopsided, perhaps, but Rimsky’s execration of the ‘topsy-turvy’ orchestration is hard to understand.

Rimsky particularly objected to the wind-only introduction. Its chromaticism, which sets the scene, is offset by beautiful diatonic writing for an onstage string quartet. The setting is simple: platforms and arches, the characters in unspecific modern dress. The cast is led by Ekaterina Scherbachenko as a touching Iolanta, with Pavel Cˇernoch as her ardent suitor. Dmitry Ulianov, Willard White and Alexej Markov deliver their set pieces admirably but time and again one’s attention is caught by Sellars’s telling direction: faces suffused in light, faces caught in profile. Towards the end the action stops and an offstage choir sings the first part of the ‘Cherubic Hymn’ from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: a typical Sellars insertion, but it’s a pity that he makes cuts elsewhere.

Perséphone, also about light and dark, is staged with the same set. It’s not so well suited to the video medium: you want to see both Persephones – reciter and dancer – but often you can’t. Sam Sathya and her fellow artists from Cambodia – mimes rather than dancers, really – are models of grace. After a slithery start, Paul Groves sings cleanly and heroically as Eumolpe. With his stick, white suit and dark glasses, he seems to have wandered in as Tiresias from Oedipus Rex – or is that stick the oar of Charon’s boat? Teodor Currentzis conducts both pieces impeccably: don’t miss.