Glitter of Waves” — Ellen Orford’s opening words in the Sunday-morning scene of Peter Grimes — is the motto for this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. There was glitter of sunlight, too, out of doors at Snape Maltings as festival-goers basked in unusually benign mid-June weather. Inside Aldeburgh Music’s brand-new facility, the 350-seat Britten Studio, in the recently opened Hoffmann Building — formerly derelict outhouses of the Maltings complex — doom and gloom reigned supreme in the world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s stylistically contrasting bill of Semper Dowland, semper dolens: theatre of melancholy and The Corridor, a scena for soprano, tenor and six instruments.

The former is the 74-year-old British new music doyen’s arrangement for string quartet, clarinets, flutes and harp of Dowland’s viol consort suite, Lachrimae or Seaven Teares — passionate pavanes based on the falling motif of Flow My Tears, one of the Tudor-Stuart composer’s most famously doleful songs — interspersed with six of his lute songs with the accompaniment transcribed for harp. The entirely new work is Birtwistle’s latest treatment of a theme that runs like a leitmotif through his work, a re-enactment, to a text by the poet David Harsent, of the Orpheus myth, specifically the moment in the Underworld when the protagonist looks back at his wife, Eurydice, and loses her for ever.

Both parts of the bill are concerned with loss, betrayal and seeking solace in death, and they are linked, musically, by Birtwistle’s use of the harp, as a substitute for the lute in Semper Dowland and symbolic of Orpheus’s lyre.

Semper Dowland is essentially a semistaged song recital with instrumental interludes, tricked out by the director, Peter Gill, with a dancing couple performing what looked like improvised workshop movements (no choreographer was credited) as a distracting accompaniment to Mark Padmore’s ravishing singing of Dowland’s heart-rending laments. As theatre, of melancholy or otherwise, it barely registers: beautiful but soporific.

His score for The Corridor, ­however, makes you sit up, and it is clear from the opening bars that a drama is afoot in which the instruments — violin, viola, cello, clarinets, flutes and harp — play a crucial role. The players participate as the Shades of the Underworld, “conversing” with Eurydice as she steps out of her sung colloquy with Orpheus to speak her innermost thoughts. In Gill’s staging — sparsely designed by Alison Chitty and atmospherically lit by Paul Pyant — the musicians are integral to the drama. Harsent’s text profiles “the Man” (Orpheus) as self-obsessed and self-pitying, “the Woman” (Eurydice) as more objective and questioning. It is a characteristically terse and gritty piece that evolves through 45 minutes into a movingly lyrical lament for loss of love. Superbly sung by Elizabeth Atherton and Padmore and outstandingly well played by members of the London Sinfonietta, Birtwistle’s new double bill gets its London premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on July 6 and 7.

Even more “niche” was the following day’s Harrison’s Clocks: A Promenade through a New Building, in which groups of about 50 people were shepherded into the Jerwood Kiln Studio to sit in darkness to listen to Birtwistle’s early 1970s “electronic” work, Chrono-meter for two asynchronous four-track tapes — essentially recordings of the bongs of Big Ben and the ding-dongs of the bells at Wells Cathedral, all mixed together into a room-shaking crescendo, intermittently sounding like a cataclysmic flushing lavatory. After that we ­proceeded into the Britten Studio for Gyorgy Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962), which, according to the festival’s annotator, is either “a comical statement of Dada-esque subversiveness that is neither poetic nor symphonic” or “a ritual that can prompt deep questions about time and timelessness, control and freedom, the human and inhuman, order and decay”. If the metronomes, all set at different time signatures, didn’t wind down one by one in less than 20 minutes, it would be modern music’s answer to Chinese water torture. I confess to being one of the guilty souls who found it funny — for about five minutes. The Promenade concluded with the diminutive Japanese pianist Hideki Nagano tearing into Birtwistle’s five dazzlingly virtuosic piano pieces, Harrison’s Clocks, demonstrating a more flamboyant side of the composer’s personality and his always impressive technical facility in writing fiendishly difficult music for every instrument.

At Paris’s most beautiful lyric theatre, the Opéra Comique, two Englishmen are showing the French how to perform their national opera. Bizet’s Carmen was premiered in the house that preceded the present building, and it has racked up close to 3,000 performances on the same site since its premiere in 1875, a period in which it has been transformed from brilliant, airy, Mozartian opéra comique into a kind of bloated, proto-verismo potboiler. It has taken “le plus francophile des chefs d’orchestre britanniques”, John Eliot Gardiner, to restore something like the original Carmen in all her magnificent glory. In the Opéra Comique’s new production, he is aided by the former RSC boss Adrian Noble, who eschews cliché in a pared-down, stripped-to-bare-essentials approach to the dramaturgy of Bizet’s score, which allows the wonderful Anna Caterina Antonacci to portray the sensual, witty, doomed antiheroine with devastating truthfulness.

With his period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the wonderfully versatile Monteverdi Choir, Gar-diner restores long-overlooked passages from Bizet’s manuscript and proposes a fast-moving, richly coloured sung drama from which all hints of routine and the accretions of tradition have been banished. Carmen has never sounded more revolutionary, romantic or thrillingly vibrant.

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