PHILADELPHIA — “Written on Skin,” an opera about the creation of an illuminated manuscript, isn’t an open book. At my first live encounter with this 2012 work at the Academy of Music here on Friday, for the premiere of a new staging by Opera Philadelphia that runs through Feb. 18, I was struck by how reserved George Benjamin’s score is.

Not that there aren’t passages of loud density or idiosyncratic instrumentation — a typewriter, pebbles, sets of small tablas and glass harmonica augment the traditional orchestra — but on the whole the music gives the sense of being artfully curbed. It’s as though “Pelléas et Mélisande” or “Wozzeck” had been partly quieted, even half-vaporized, their roiling energies kept — and sometimes not — at bay.