JUDITH BINGHAM’s fascinating music drama The Ivory Tree, staged at St Edmundsbury Cathedral to celebrate the completion of the cathedral’s new Millennium Tower, was called The Ivory Tower in a slip of the tongue by the BBC’s Look East programme.

Yet the composer lives in no such fastness.

Her allusive text looks east and west and north, and fuses copious layers: Church Parable, mummers’ play, the Germanic world tree, biblical allusion, the Green Man and medieval pageant, the Christian and pagan year, and, most affectingly, a dreamlike interweaving of the death of Edmund, Saxon king and martyr, with scenes from the crucifixion, deposition and resurrection of our Lord.

A strangely evocative work, The Ivory Tree unfolds like an inviting five-part tapestry, rich in the power of suggestion.

The source of these stylised scenes, central to the work’s inspiration, is the 12th-century Romanesque cross carved from walrus ivory and known as the Cloisters Cross or the Bury Cross.

Controversy surrounds it, as to both its origins and its implications, but its original provenance has been surmised to be the medieval Bury Abbey, whose ruins lie today about the cathedral. Bury St Edmunds possesses a superbly detailed replica. The original is in New York.

That The Ivory Tree is something of a collage, in which its elusive images feed off and enhance one another, is suggested by the composer’s use of the word “dream” to designate each section presented by means of solo voice, spoken narration, and choral or instrumental interjection.

Collage can be a synonym for “muddle”; without more detailed elucidation, someone sitting further back and less able to catch the words clearly might be forgiven for wondering, as I did amid this stream of cartwheeling images, whether my mind had not been addled by a modest draught of Abbot, the Suffolk ale brewed nearby.

It was the presentation that made the evening compelling: these tableaux, evolved by the director (Ray Dyer), designer (Pauline Judge), and choreographer (Sarah Franklin), were exquisitely managed, with an eye for fine detail.

Some of the ostensibly simple dances for amateur performers included kaleidoscopic tracery so subtle, intricate, and unexpected that it spawned its own beguiling imagery.

The costumes and props, also echoing detail from the Bury Cross, revealed a fertile imagination.

Judith Bingham’s music, itself intricately patterned, and underpinned by medieval carol and plainchant, soldered the performance together.

Organ, clarinet and saxophone supplied almost sensual interludes; the six-part brass was resplendent with  echoes of Janácek; and her use of paired flutes heralding one woodland dance was  bewitching.

The baritone Robert Rice found a warmly optimistic characterisation for the part of the Ivory Carver; and the bass Richard Strivens brought uplifting intensity to the part of Samson, Abbot of Bury during the Third Crusade, whose memories and anxious dreams are focal to two main scenes.

The countertenor Timothy Garrard lent marked pathos to the tribulations of the wounded and doomed Edmund: the royal strength visibly ebbed on stage. His severed head was curiously paraded by a “dark” wolf figure, like some trophy from The Golden Bough.

From all this we were meant, I think, to draw refreshed energy, sensing at many levels, and in compatible pagan and Christian terms, processes of new hope and rebirth — just as St Edmund’s miraculously uncorrupted, coffin-preserved body seems to sprout the tree of the title at the close.

I grasped some of it, but by no means all; so whether The Ivory Tree is more fecund or convolute I’m not sure. But the St Edmundsbury Choir under James Thomas lifted itself to high standards, and its vital contributions were enhanced by a subtle lighting effect through gauze.

Overall, this was a mesmerising if mysterious evening, and a joyous tribute to the gleaming limestone cathedral tower above our heads.