In November, the Royal Opera stages the world premiere of Morning and Evening, a new work by the 61-year-old Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. By way of a taster, this Linbury programme brings together two of Haas’s earlier works, linked in a production designed and directed by Netia Jones.

Atthis is mentioned in the poems of Sappho as a love-object. Haas’s 2009 song-cycle – here sung and spoken with shining authority by the soprano Claire Booth, stationed on a ledge at the midpoint of the lunar disc that forms Jones’s set – sews Sapphic fragments together in an account of a relationship between the poet and the younger woman that begins with its dissolution and travels backwards in time to its inception. The text is alternately in ancient Greek and German, though Jones’s atmospheric video designs also incorporate Ruth Padel’s English translation alongside diverse imagery including water, frost, plants and glass shattering.

Haas’s accompaniment, scored for an eight-piece ensemble – here scrupulously played by members of the London Sinfonietta under the baton of Pierre-André Valade – is lucid in texture yet also subtle and mysterious, forming a troubled background to a wide-ranging vocal line that swoops up and down to describe the unstable trajectory of Sappho’s all-pervading passion.

Preceding this vocal work, Haas’s Second String Quartet of 1998 is employed as the basis for a danced narrative in which Sappho’s affair with Atthis is viewed from its beginning to its end – the opposite of the version relayed in the song-cycle. Dancers Laure Bachelot and Rachel Maybank represent Sappho and Atthis respectively, their movements exploring the intricate emotions informing their sexual relationship. Violinists Alexandra Wood and Joan Atherton join with violist Paul Silverthorne and cellist Sally Pendlebury to articulate the rich inner life of a score that whets the appetite for more.

• At the Linbury Studio until 25 April. Box office: 020-7304 4000.