Scottish Opera has followed other companies in creating a programme of specially commissioned short works, in this case five, each meant to last 15 minutes. Five:15 was unveiled in Glasgow, not in the company’s home, the Theatre Royal, but in the converted church of Oran Mor, and in Edinburgh it went to the Hub, where the final performance is tonight. The 15-minute specification sets the venture apart. Short operas tend to be nearer half an hour. It is a challenge, indeed, to pull off a coherent music-theatre piece that is so succinct, a true sonnet of the genre. Although only the first of the five, Gareth Williams’s The King’s Conjecture, to a libretto by Bernard Mac-Laverty, felt like 15 minutes, and the second, Nigel Osborne’s The Queens of Govan, to words by Suhayl Saadi, with live sarod (Indian lute) music by Wajahat Khan, felt a lot longer, they all had a unitary, compact quality that made sense of the difficult brief. They seemed a different thing from traditional one-act opera.

The works were more like revue sketches (though only two were comic), with an unexpected third dimension of serious music, in one case a positively explosive one. The conductor, Derek Clark, was the same throughout, as was the designer, Andrew Storer, whose set, a white, curving, balconied double staircase, seemed to offer itself to any dramatic action whatever. Above it, and not linked to the action, though one felt it should be, was a striking blue zodiac mural painted by the writer Alas-dair Gray, who lives nearby. Local writers had been chosen by Scottish Opera as librettists for this “made in Scotland” project, in which they were paired with composers, only one of whom, Craig Armstrong, was born in Scotland, but all of whom are based there. Michael McCarthy, artistic director of Music Theatre Wales, was dramaturg for the project, and himself staged the Osborne and the evening’s gory finale, Armstrong’s Gesualdo, to words by Ian Rankin.

Cast for a high-voiced trio of soprano (Kate Valentine), countertenor (William Purefoy) and tenor (Alexander Grove), and exploring the conscience of the titular 16th-century composer-prince, who murdered his wife and her lover, this piece began with Gesualdo and his servant stabbing the bodies like mad. A tone of high exacerbation prevails. Gesualdo, vividly taken by Grove, is flagellated by the servant, who then makes the point that if he kills his master, his master’s music will die too. Armstrong did not manage (or really attempt) to convey a sense of that music and its sublime power. He did generate a clamorous tension, but his score was inclined to the repetitive chord-chugging that has, alas, become an operatic lingua franca, thanks to the American minimalists.

Williams’s piece, staged by Ben Twist, was in this vein, though not unskilfully brought off. It had a curious historical theme - James IV of Scotland’s cruel experiment to see if an infant, kept apart from human speech and reared by a deaf-mute, would grow up speaking “the language of God” - and the treatment was admirably concise, even fitting in a dumb show. Valentine, as the incongruously articulate deaf-mute, Peter Van Hulle, as the king, and Nicholas Garrett, as his boatman, belted out their parts, but a deeper musical compulsion was lacking.

In his programme essay, McCarthy saw the operas as “part of a process and not a finished product”, which may or may not be fair on the audience. All but one came across as explorations rather than crystallisations of the medium, but explorations that were often musically timid. Stephen Deazley’s score for Dream Angus - an earnest spoof about pigs, picnics and psychoanalysis, adapted by Alexander McCall Smith from his novel of the same name (staged by Twist) - was lively enough, and adroit with ensembles, but couched in an all-purpose neoromanticism that reminded me of what the Germans call Gebrauchsmusik (utility music).

Osborne did not resort to this, exactly, but long stretches of his monodrama about the cultural predicament of a modern Asian-Glaswegian girl (Elizabeth McCormack) were Khan’s sarod solos. (It was thrilling, though, when the orchestra joined him in unison at great speed.) Only The Perfect Woman, composed by Lyell Cresswell to a text by Ron Butlin, presented music as the absolute, joyous justification of opera. This witty exposé of scientific hubris, staged by Frederic Wake-Walker, opened the evening’s second half with a bang. Hardly any surtitles, but one could easily follow the three singers (Paul Keohone, Lise Christensen and Van Hulle) and a febrile score of such instant mastery - Cresswell, an established figure, has his own mature idiom - that one never thought about the music at all. One was the music, while it lasted. This suggested itself as the age-old answer to McCarthy’s question: “What is opera in the 21st century?”

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