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Two contemporary operas give us darkness and death in riveting, inexorable performances. 

The Royal Opera House get us in the mood for Halloween with a deliciously creepy, lean production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse. 

The Royal Academy of Music tonight presented the fruits of their latest postgraduate opera course with two short operas representing opposite ends of the musical timeline.Purcell’s miniature three-act opera really needs no introduction.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s latest venture, a production of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ 1979 piece The Lighthouse, played to a packed Carriageworks theatre on Monday. In an era when the continued viability of classical music institutions is debated hotly, the fact that this new company can pull in the crowds for a challenging modernist work is cause for congratulation.

With its small raised platform and steeply seated audience, the Linbury Studio Theatre was an auspicious venue for the English Touring Opera’s production of Peter Maxwell Davies’ chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979). The trelliswork of metal bars encircling the stalls and the bleak lighting effects gave this performance a befittingly industrial air.

In 1900, a relief ship arrived at a lighthouse in Northern Scotland's Orkney Islands, and discovered the three lightkeepers had gone missing without a trace. Peter Maxwell Davies' opera The Lighthouse takes this moment of history and explores the possibilities of what may have happened. It is a stormy ride of shifting identities, guilt and fear.