Rarely can a new opera have fallen as flat as The Burial at Thebes, a setting of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone, given its premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe, a place not hitherto associated with the art form. Of the creative team responsible, Heaney is the least blameworthy, or not so at all.

His verse play of the same title, commissioned for the 2004 centenary of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, has a powerful eloquence, but it seems hardly to have been transformed into a libretto, and there are a great many sung words to get through. Large quantities of it — the roles of the Guard and the Messenger — are, however, unset and left to actors, the second of whom (John Van der Put) delivered his lines with surprising woodenness, while the first (John Joyce) was embarrassingly jokey. An atmosphere of amateur theatricals hung over the performance (as did the real atmosphere, with its passing planes), though most examples I’ve seen of that honourable genre have been more effectively staged than this piece of work by Derek Walcott.

The production is the Nobel- winning poet’s British debut as a director — he runs a theatre company in Trinidad — and the first opera he has undertaken, but no rattling of Nobel jewellery (Heaney is also a laureate) could save the evening from all-consuming bathos. The strapping young man (Gregoire A Meyer) prancing in a leotard to signify “the Spirit of the City” was an apter symbol of directorial clumsiness.

Walcott also designed the production, though that only meant thinking up costumes, as there was no scenery. He has updated the action to some contemporary South American republic, as plausible a setting for the archetypal clash between loyalty to the state and individual morality as anywhere. This is essentially a Caribbean Antigone, and the composer, Dominique Le Gendre, a Trinidadian, has drawn on rapso, the modern version of calypso, to make her word-setting distinctive.

Alas, it comes over as merely garbled — awkward mouthfuls of syllables, generally assigned to King Creon (Brian Green), accompanied by a dry patter of side drum. Perhaps she should have gone further, into full-blooded rap, but tepidity is the keynote of the score. Although she is the first woman commissioned to write a full-length opera for Covent Garden, she is scarcely a path-breaker when it comes to idiom. Her bare and sourly tonal counterpoints and riffs, played by the Manning Camerata in the gallery — the conductor, Peter Manning, was some distance away on the floor below — suggested that the text was becoming music only with a struggle. There was no lyric relief. Antigone, sung rather whinily by the soprano Idit Arad, conveyed the idea of intensity, but never embodied it. The mezzo Andrea Baker, as her restraining sister Ismene, was the evening’s best approximation to vocal allure.

After such a lack of compositional focus, one is all the more appreciative of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s well-devised Music of Today series at the Festival Hall. These 6pm, free-admission hours, preceding more mainstream programmes by the orchestra, tend to be portraits of a single composer, usually present to be interviewed by the series director, Julian Anderson. The first in the new season was the young Dutchman Michel van der Aa, who revealed that his training extends to film and stage direction, and there was a theatricality to the two pieces we heard. Just Before, for piano (the prodigious Benjamin Kobler) and soundtrack, had something of the note-profusive flamboyance of Stockhausen’s Mantra. Masks, for 12 players and soundtrack, conducted by Baldur Bronnimann, juxtaposed hectic intricacy of part-writing with vaguely dadaist gestures (unpeeling sticky tape, gradually sheathing a ticking metronome in black cloth) from the percussionist.

Another welcome return is of the Southbank Centre’s Messiaen centenary festival, From the Canyons to the Stars, which began in February, resumed in May and is having a busy October. At Queen Elizabeth Hall, the London Sinfonietta and the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble were conducted by one Messiaen pupil, George Benjamin, in a remarkable, concert-length work by another, the late Gérard Grisey. Les Espaces acoustiques (1974-85) is a cycle of six pieces whose scoring steadily increases from solo viola (Paul Silverthorne) to seven, 18, 33 and 84 musicians, only just fitted on the stage. The music systematically mines the expressive possibilities of overtones, frequently cleaving to a single pitch for long stretches, yet, in the later parts, building huge, complex, incandescent climaxes. This British premiere of the complete cycle became ever more enthralling.

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