Tales of Love and Loss: the title made this triple bill of English-language one-acters from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Artists sound like something very serious. In fact, it sent us out laughing.

Admittedly, after the first work the mood could only lighten. Elizabeth Maconchy’s 1961 two-hander The Departure, last staged in 2007, begins with a woman watching a funeral through her bedroom window; when her husband comes home she realises it is her own death that is being mourned, and that she is there to say farewell. Directed by Talia Stern, in a 1960s set designed by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, it flirted with melodrama, especially in the flashing-light effects as she remembered the fatal car crash, and the ending, with the sound of a baby crying, felt mawkish. Still, Maconchy’s music, sombre yet lyrically expansive in a way that made it feel like the orchestra was bigger than the 14-strong Britten Sinfonia, made an impressive vocal showcase for the mezzo-soprano Ellen Pearson and baritone Sam Hird.

Charlotte Bray’s Making Arrangements, which originated at the 2012 Tête-à-Tête Opera festival and sets a nicely pointed libretto by Kate Kennedy, also has a wife as a kind of ghost, but here it’s to almost comic effect: she’s the writer of a letter cajoling her rich, boring, soon-to-be-ex-husband to send on her belongings. Something snaps, and we find ourselves almost cheering him on in his gothic rampage of destruction through a box of her evening dresses. Bray’s lean, focused score, conducted by Peggy Wu, tells the story stylishly, not least in the elegant passages when husband Hewson reads the letter with Margery’s voice tuning in and out. Hird and Hannah Edmunds captured the tragicomic mood nicely.

The best came last. Elena Langer’s Four Sisters, also from 2012 but given here in a brand new chamber-orchestra version, opened with a frenzied overture on a morning-after scene in a smart 1980s apartment: at the back, a coffin and a portrait of a glowering patriarch; on the designer sofas in front, his three acknowledged daughters, passed out in varyingly undignified poses, waking only when the maid prises the Veuve Cliquot from their sleeping fingers. The plot, smartly dispatched in John Lloyd Davies’s tweezer-sharp libretto, hinges on the reading of his will and the existence of a fourth daughter – the reveal of whose identity is no less satisfying for the fact that we see it galloping across the horizon from the very start. Langer’s music is effortlessly witty, pivoting between styles for the sisters’ mini-arias sharing their dreams of wealth, and the cast – Pearson, Jingwen Cai and Madeline Robinson as the sisters, with Hird as the Noo Yoik lawyer and Edmunds as the dark-horse Maid – had a ball with it.