The Lighthouse, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Is there a finer city in the western world with as meagre an opera tradition as Boston’s? Never able to shake its Puritan hostility to the art form, the city that turned a cold shoulder to the flawed but brilliant Sarah Caldwell years ago lost its plucky troupe Opera Boston in December, ostensibly for financial reasons. Now Boston Lyric Opera soldiers on alone, its recent embrace of offbeat repertoire (formerly an Opera Boston specialty) now even more essential. Peter Maxwell Davies’s 75-minute The Lighthouse (1980) is ideal for an opera company on a budget – high in quality but demanding only three singers and 12 instrumentalists, a point confirmed by Tim Albery’s taut production.

Substantially embellishing historical fact – the unexplained disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from northern Scotland’s Flannan Islands in 1900 – Maxwell Davies created a psychological thriller in which too much unvaried time, spent with unvaried company in too little space, brings mental breakdown. Compellingly framed by scenes for three officers (played by the same singers) from the ship that discovered the loss, the central action finds the lighthouse men vainly warding off stir-craziness, most arrestingly by singing songs for each other. Each of the three songs thus resulting is thoroughly captivating, but the one by Blazes – about his murder of a woman in a botched robbery, for which his father was hanged – is the one whose subject lingers longest in the mind.

The songs were the evening’s highpoint, but they shouldn’t have been: one missed a crescendo of Hitchcock-like suspense spanning the opera. Camellia Koo’s basic metallic set was resourceful and her footpath through the audience made up of compressed naval uniforms ingenious. Albery gave the singers cogent direction, but he had difficulty creating a feeling of claustrophobia in the museum’s Smith Hall. A non-theatrical facility, it was chosen as part of the company’s Opera Annex initiative – which matches operas with unusual venues – because it commands a view of Boston Harbor. Yet what you could see of the harbor looked inaptly serene.

Besides writing ingratiatingly for voice, Maxwell Davies supplied assertive, jagged, inventive, rhythmically vital, idiomatically conceived instrumental writing. Boston Lyric’s music director David Angus moved the music along fluently without giving it much interpretive shape. The singers were uniformly excellent – baritone Christopher Burchett as Blazes, tenor John Bellemer as the lovesick Sandy and bass-baritone David Cushing as the religious fanatic Arthur.

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