In Opera Philadelphia’s ‘The Listeners,’ Missy Mazzoli works her magic but it’s all very fleeting

What human deficit is it that keeps some of us from seeing a total con man in plain sight for what he is?

The Listeners, the bleak but intriguing two-act opera given its U.S. debut by Opera Philadelphia Wednesday night at the Academy of Music, is ostensibly about a mysterious atmospheric hum that appears in a suburban town. But at its heart, the opera is about a cult and the pain and void that makes people susceptible to its leader, and if that isn’t relatable enough for today’s audiences, the work is stuffed with enough contemporary colloquialisms to make it decipherable by the average teenager.

A depiction of an Instagram Live by the cult leader is cruel and cutting, and hilarious.

The relatability factor timed out well for Opera Philadelphia given the fact that the audience was stocked with newbies (58% were Opera Philadelphia first timers) lured by the company’s new $11 ticket program. The planning of this production, with all of its extramusical on-ramps, was set long before Anthony Roth Costanzo took over as general director and president. But Costanzo came out on stage before the curtain to tout the opera’s virtues and to put a stake in the ground on what opera is: music, theater, visual arts, fashion and more, he said.

This much is true; composers going back even further than Wagner, Verdi, and Mozart saw that art form as genre-encompassing.

But an opera is first and foremost a piece of music, and in The Listeners, the music sometimes gets trampled by all the other stimulants. It’s a shame, since Missy Mazzoli’s score gets more fascinating the closer you listen. She’s one of those composers who absorbs influences regardless of style or time period — an American vernacular sound here, a repeated figure suggesting minimalism there. That a plaintive oboe or trumpet solo just begins to suggest warmth or reassurance before it gets yanked, only increases the emotional impact. The Opera Philadelphia orchestra, led by Corrado Rovaris, played deftly, pivoting back and forth from mass to subtlety with great beauty.

For all of its contemporary trappings, The Listeners — commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, the Norwegian National Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago — is a rather traditional opera. There are arias and choruses, character development, a story with a journey. The aria that opens the second act was a confessional so moving it could exist on a song recital program by itself.

“People disappear all the time,” sings Angela, one of the cult leader’s lovers, in a libretto by Royce Vavrek (the opera is based on an original story by Jordan Tannahill). Her father, boyfriends, and others have gone — “Left me with nothing but noise” — hence her attraction to Howard, the cult leader. Here, Vavrek unspooled the motive, Mazzoli painted text in poignant and pulsing tones, and mezzo-soprano Rehanna Thelwell shaped Angela’s story in a highly personal way.

The strongest three roles in the opera belong to women. Soprano Nicole Heaston as the mother, a teacher named Claire, and soprano Lindsey Reynolds as her daughter, Ashley, were particularly magnetic. In an aria taking her mother to task, Reynolds (a recent Curtis Institute graduate) found an emotional specificity that landed like daggers. I wish there had been more menace in Kevin Burdette’s voice, but his portrayal of cult leader Howard Bard was merely creepy.

Amid this dystopian world — a world that “has been known to conspire against our personal equilibrium,” as Bard puts it — this listener yearned for some sympathetic character in the opera, someone to care about who doesn’t pull out a gun, angrily curse her way through life, or lead you along only to betray your trust by going all culty in the end.

As it is, the only bits of reassurance you get are in Mazzoli’s patchwork aesthetic, and those you had to process quickly, and then they were gone.

Additional performances: Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. and Sept. 29 at 2 p.m. at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locusts Streets. Tickets are $11 or pay-what-you-wish. Availability is limited. operaphila.org or 215-732-8400.