A consistent highlight of recent Boston Lyric Opera seasons has been its Opera Annex series, offering a single production annually of more adventurous repertoire in a location outside the company’s home in the acoustically challenged Shubert Theatre. This year’s selection, “The Lighthouse’’ by Peter Maxwell Davies, opened last night at the John F. Kennedy Library and it is another clear success, a night of darkly riveting modern chamber opera played out against the backdrop of Boston Harbor.
“The Lighthouse,’’ which premiered in 1980, is a mix of historical mystery and grim psychological fable. It was inspired by an actual event: the strange disappearance of three keepers from a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland in 1900. Their fate was never discovered, despite an official investigation that provides the narrative frame for the opera’s prologue. Most of the work, however, unfolds in a single compressed act that fancifully imagines what might have happened to the keepers on their final night. Davies’s score, with his own libretto, is a marvel of economy, deploying the most modest vocal and instrumental forces - admittedly pushed to the very edge of their techniques, and sometimes beyond - to create distinct characterizations for each keeper, sketch three misty backstories, and then push each man, under extreme stress, into the abyss of his past. .
