Death permeates Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea, and it hovers tragically over English National Opera’s production.

Staged to mark the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death, it has become a memorial to Richard Hickox, who was due to conduct but whose death last weekend leaves a gaping hole in Britain’s musical life.

ENO’s music director Edward Gardner has stepped into the breach, but Hickox’s preparations have, no doubt, left their mark.

Riders to the Sea lasts 40 minutes, hardly enough for a night at the opera, so ENO has boldly made a kind of overture from Sibelius’s tone-poem Luonnotar. It tells of a woman whose sea-bound labours give birth to the world, while Riders centres on Maurya, for whom the sea brings only pain, killing her husband, father-in-law and six sons.

The staging is by Fiona Shaw, making her operatic debut with the kind of talky opera that suits an actor putting on director’s clothes. Vaughan Williams set JM Synge’s original play virtually intact, and if the Irish brogue demanded of the singers seems arch today, Shaw makes them sound convincing. Tom Pye provides a set that balances between naturalism and abstraction, with fishing barques and towering rocks serving as ominous motifs.

Patricia Bardon fills the stage with Maurya’s grief. Her pain-wracked voice is supported by the kind of detailed acting that few opera singers manage. She dominates but smaller roles are well taken.

To open proceedings, Susan Gritton sings Luonnotar from within an upended barque that is both birthing bed and coffin, while Dorothy Cross’s dreamy, Bill Viola-like video provides a backdrop. A short evening perhaps, but it is 60 minutes of haunting music and striking images.
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