The Manhattan School of Music offers many interesting evenings in the course of the academic year, but none are as eagerly awaited as their signature traversals of operatic rarities. For many years, the MSM has enjoyed a reputation as the most innovative company in town, and I have especially fond memories of a “Le Comte Ory” one season, and a double bill of Gustav Holst’s “Savitri” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti” in another.

On Wednesday, the MSM treated its audience to another juxtaposition: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Riders to the Sea”and Lennox Berkeley’s “A Dinner Engagement.” The first half of the double bill was brilliant. Not just “compliment them because they are students” brilliant, but very well done on a professional level.

“Riders to the Sea” of course, is based on the play by J.M. Synge. As a one-act, it has had a limited performance history for a mature Vaughan Williams work. There was a television production a few years back, but otherwise it is a little too short to stand alone and a bit overwhelming to couple with another work. A vignette about the wild, rugged life on the Isle of Arran, the opera drops in on Maurya, who has lost all of the eight men in her family to the power of the sea.

Like Dukas’s “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue,” this is essentially an all-female opera.The music and the drama depend on subtle contrasts of voices, and here the MSM singers really shone. Sharin Apostolou and Marissa Famighetti, as Nora and Cathleen, respectively, were starkly different in tessitura and, although grieving, still managed to bicker like the young sisters they portrayed. But the real star was the Maurya of Krysty Swann, who appeared last season in the MSM production of Lee Hoiby’s “A Month in the Country.”

I once interviewed Wolfgang Wagner and asked him about growing up in the same house as his grandmother Cosima. He said she lived completely in her own world; even her vocabulary and accent were different from the rest of the family, and she never actually talked to anyone, only to the void.This is exactly how Ms. Swann played the matriarch, and the effect was chilling.

Ms. Swann also possesses a huge mezzo voice and seems on the road to a fine career (she currently studies with Mignon Dunn at the school). She was totally in character and seemed not to notice the other players around her. She became, in her grief, a character in a much bigger drama with much higher stakes – there is in fact a line where she predicts her own imminent death. Her deep intonations created a mysterious basso continuo for the soaring soprano of chorus member Tricia Suriani, whose purity of vocalise tone wafted above the action as a companion to the wind machine from the pit that ultimately is the last noise standing.This was quite simply an exquisite performance.

The descriptive orchestral maelstrom of wind and water is a foreshadowing of Vaughan Williams’s powerful “Sinfonia Antartica.” Conductor David Gilbert had his instrumental ensemble in fine shape: The individual colors were solid, complimentary earth tones that sometimes morphed into frightening meteorological demons. This score is rich and the MSM musicians responded in kind. It was obvious that a great deal of rehearsal time had been expended with splendid result.

Lennox Berkeley is perhaps best known as the teacher of Richard Rodney Bennett, whose “The Mines of Sulphur” was mounted at City Opera this past autumn.(Mr.Bennett returned the favor as the mentor of Berkeley’s son Michael, a well-known contemporary composer – there’s an oxymoron for you – in England.) Berkeley’s “A Dinner Engagement” is, truth be told, not much of a piece, and it is easy to hear whence Bennett learned his lack of melodic inventiveness, but the company certainly made the most of it.

Humor in opera is the hardest mask to sustain, and when the jokes aren’t very funny, it is a bear with which to wrestle. But these performers, hovering between artist and aspirant, actually pulled it off. I can’t say I laughed at any point, but the audience certainly did, and that seemed a major accomplishment. The conceit of the work is that it is a bedroom farce transplanted into the kitchen, with lust for cold cherry soup supplanting more customary urges in a potential betrothal.

Standouts included Sarah Williams as Mrs. Kneebone and JennyRebecca Walker as the countess. All did reasonably well, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sympathy for the members of the cast, stuck as they were in this dud of a Gallic bagatelle where the individual musical lines never really blossomed.