Quartett review – dour and discomforting but ultimately rewarding

Premiered at La Scala, Milan, in 2011, Luca Francesconi's Quartett arrives for a run at the Linbury in a new staging by John Fulljames. The composer's own libretto derives from Heiner Müller's play of the same name, first performed in 1982 and itself based on Laclos' 18th-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

As with Müller's drama, though, the opera is no straightforward adaptation of the book: it is set simultaneously in a salon before the French revolution and in a bunker following world war three. Laclos' sexual schemers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, play themselves and each other, but also double as their two victims, thus completing the quartet of the title; in the first of two casts, the amoral aristocrats are sung with unstinting commitment, both vocal and physical, by baritone Leigh Melrose and mezzo Kirstin Chávez.

Deliberately, there is little left in the theatrical version of Laclos' narrative other than the combative, competitive game-playing between Valmont and Merteuil, which ends with him drinking poisoned wine and her watching him die. The result is uncompromisingly bleak, though whereas Müller claimed his play, cryptically, to be "a reflection on the problem of terrorism", Francesconi instead speaks of "a tragic and nihilistic delirium".

Dense and multilayered, the score is 80 minutes long. Recorded elements involving the Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala filter into the live performance, here confidently presented by the London Sinfonietta under Andrew Gourlay. In addition, electronic and computer music provide further constituents of the "fantastic multimedia machine" the composer believes contemporary opera ought to be.

On Soutra Gilmour's set, Fulljames's production plays out on a grungy platform where Valmont and Merteuil's few remaining possessions seem to be contained in a handful of plastic bags tied to railings. Above them hang strips of frayed white fabric, on which Ravi Deepres' film designs are projected. The orchestra is half hidden beneath.

The gaunt and astringent visuals are counterpointed by the invasively restless, unruly and multifarious score, out of whose texture fragments of past music fleetingly arise and disappear, almost before they can clearly register. Yet, in inundating the auditorium with sound, Francesconi does succeed in creating tension – especially later on, when the suggestion of a menacing fate threatening to annihilate the civilisation of which the two protagonists form such an inglorious close becomes palpable. The result is a dour and discomfiting evening – though ultimately a rewarding one.