The big London companies gave two UK premières in the space of a week, both dealing with the subject of teenagers being shot dead. Kaija Saariaho and Sofi Oksanen’s new opera Innocence was premièred at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021 and comes to the Royal Opera in exactly the same production by Simon Stone, the Australian director responsible for that lockdown favourite The Dig as well as a shattering staging (in Munich, in 2019) of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt.

So Innocence was never likely to pull its punches. Chloe Lamford’s set – a brightly lit modernist structure that revolves as the plot moves between present and (traumatic) past – is simultaneously bold and simple. It needs to be, because in telling a story spread across a decade from the perspectives of some 13 distinctly drawn characters, Saariaho and her librettist have set themselves a formidable challenge. On first viewing, I’d say they’ve pulled it off, and with compelling power. We’re at a wedding reception in contemporary Finland: inevitably, you think Festen; you think Melancholia. You know that something monstrous is going to surface, and Innocence explores that something with terrible, tender, unflinching care. So careful, in fact, are Saariaho and Oksanen to probe the full complexity of the story – to allow every character their humanity and their due share of innocence and culpability – that it’s almost painful to experience. Innocence is scar tissue being probed until the blood starts to seep; a series of elastoplasts being pulled off very slowly indeed. And yet – this being Saariaho – it sounds utterly beguiling: easing you in, lulling you with its shimmering melancholy and shifting colours, until suddenly the horror is real and you realise that you’re being propelled forwards at a frightening pace.

Everyone knows that Saariaho can weave skeins of slow-moving sonic wonder. Foolishly, I hadn’t previously credited her as a composer who could generate dramatic momentum, or draw detailed characters. But here they all are, coaxed into life by Stone’s direction: Patricia the mother-in-law, sung with frantic brightness by Sandrine Piau. Lucy Shelton, voice pitted with pain as Cecilia, an ex-teacher broken by her memories. Jenny Carlstedt – entirely believable (and singing with aching expression) as Tereza, whose suppressed grief triggers the whole unravelling process. And most striking of all, Vilma Jaa as her daughter Marketa, standing out from a group of high-school kids with her vocalisations in Finnish folk style, which sounds contrived on paper but actually gave her performance a piercing, supernatural luminescence that – without wanting to drop any more spoilers – lifts Innocence from opera-as-reportage to something more like a modern myth. Susanna Malkki conducts, and you’ll never hear so much radiance from so many shades of grey.

Over at ENO, meanwhile, Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s 2019 opera Blue deals in stark black and white. Literally: to audiences outside the US, Blue will come across as an opera about the murderous insanity of US gun culture. But since Tesori and Tazewell are American, they see the big story here as race, and proceed accordingly. The setting is contemporary Harlem and we meet a family of unnamed archetypes, which is rarely a good sign – The Father (Kenneth Kellogg), The Mother (Nadine Benjamin), The Son (Zwakele Tshabalala). The Father is a policeman, treated with contempt by his friends and family. The Son is a teenage activist and quarrels with his father before the story’s (unseen and unexplained) central tragedy.

Plenty to explore here, then, and in a couple of early, only slightly overlong scenes – as Mother and Father announce their impending parenthood to their friends – Tesori and Thompson show that they can handle dialogue and character with wit and pace. And then: well, no one develops. How does the Father persist in a profession that is so despised? What are the actual circumstances behind the Son’s fate? Are these people merely victims in a world of motiveless white malignity? Questions are trailed but never explored. A soul-searching dialogue in Act Two, with Ronald Samm singing nobly as an (again, unnamed) Priest, sputters out as the Father adopts, wholesale, his son’s racialised fury, and the action slows to a halt in a welter of sermonising and soul food.

The best thing about Blue is the quality of the performances, as well as the slick, digitally enhanced set: credit to director Tinuke Craig and designer Alex Lowde. There is some glorious singing. Benjamin, in particular, has never sounded more lustrous and gives Tesori’s score (Bernstein plus Copland plus corn syrup, with dissonance served on the side like a dill pickle) an emotive gut punch that helps you overlook the bland vocal writing, and its tic of inserting long high notes in any phrase, regardless of character or context. But who needs nuance, in what is essentially a morality play? The production is striking; the piece is a dud.