An Ocean of Rain/Opening Concerts, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings

When the six instrumentalists of the Dutch Ensemble MAE leapt to their feet, dashing their stands and music to the ground, there was a frisson at the world premiere of An Ocean of Rain. Had the players decided that enough was enough? Alas not, since this worthy piece of music drama has at least three possible endings, along with three pillars of plot ("wave" moments), three "time" strands (divided between the here-and-now and the afterlife) and three women getting back in touch with their inner selves (involving, in the case of two of them, a somewhat superfluous lesbian affair).

An Ocean of Rain, which opened the 61st Aldeburgh Festival, is a co-production between London's Almeida Theatre, Aldeburgh and the Glasgow-based Cryptic. The several threads of story, to a libretto by the French-Canadian Daniel Danis, introduce an abused prostitute in Haiti called Kiev, whose desperation to return to the safety of the orphanage in which she once lived drives her to self-immolation. Three liberated females – named New York, Cairo and Kyoto, possibly after a series of international agreements – have come to Haiti to help out in this very orphanage, run by Sister Delhi. With the exception of Kiev (a speaking role), the singing members of the all-female cast of six are, or could be, ghosts or even hallucinations. They do, in fact, die in a tsunami but not until well in to the piece. So far, so confusing.

The music, something of a patchwork by the Anglo-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides, is scored for a curious line-up of recorders, violin, double bass and electric guitar, with the addition of a sepulchral trombone and Indian harmonium. There's a prominent electronic element and an ambient soundscape featuring the voices of the orphanage children (as Scottish in accent, inexplicably, as Jean Brodie's girls at play), snatches of Creole dance music on radio, beating rain and swishing surf. Video projections by Julia Bardsley enhance a rather minimalist visual experience in what is, in effect, a semi-staging (the instrumentalists integrated among the actors) dominated by the impenetrable metal gates of the orphanage.

Director Cathie Boyd may have experienced Haitian culture first-hand, including a seven-hour voodoo ceremony, but with such an unfocused storyline, divided into 30 short scenes mixing abstract and concrete, memory and reality, there was nothing that the valiant little cast could do to inject some much-needed dramatic structure and musical purpose and pace into this ill-conceived piece.

Should the festival's artistic director, Thomas Adès, not have exerted some quality control when he saw how the project was turning out? He may have had other things on his mind, given that he failed to complete the commission promised for his final festival as cultural figurehead. Appearing with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in a concert of his own music and that of one of the Festival's featured composers, György Kurtág, Adès conducted the second performance of Gerald Barry's vocal scena Beethoven. A setting of three of the composer's letters to his "Immortal Beloved", Barry's brilliantly imaginative score not only captures the mercurial temperament of the composer, but – as demonstrated in a virtuoso performance by Stephen Richardson, whose voice stretched from basso profundo to falsetto – his frustrated passions and self-deprecatory wit as well.

The previous evening, the festival's artistic director-in-waiting, the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, both played with and conducted the Britten Sinfonia in an uninterrupted sequence of pieces by Webern and Kurtág miniatures, framed by Schoenberg and Ives (The Unanswered Question). It was a fascinating juxtaposition of musical expressions, all the more so for coming between a spirited account of Haydn's Symphony No 22 and a bluffly buoyant performance of Mozart's "Coronation" Piano Concerto.

'An Ocean of Rain' is at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020-7359 4404) from 10 to 13 July; the 61st Aldeburgh Festival runs to 29 June (01728 687 110)