Two Boys

Two Boys

Nico Muhly

(Nonesuch)

When it premiered at English National Opera in 2011, Nico Muhly's first full-length opera had a mixed critical reception, but Edward Seckerson's Independent review, which spoke of the music as "a digital score without digitalisms" rang thoughtfully true.

Muhly has worked with Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons as well as classical violinists Hilary Hahn and Pekka Kuusisto, and has been straightforward about the Meredith Monk and Steve Reich influences on his score, which sets playwright Craig Lucas's libretto of a dark tale of the grimy side of the internet, drawn from a true story from suburban Manchester.

In the New York Met staging captured here (the work was a co-production), Alice Coote sings the central role of Detective Anne Strawson (played by Susan Bickley at ENO), and Paul Appleby is Brian, the teenage tenor role sung by Nicky Spence in London. Both are very good, although I'd like to have heard the original cast. Muhly's is not, it is fair to say, a startlingly original music voice, but the debts he owes - to Benjamin Britten in particular to my ears - work well for what is a resolutely modern opera that plays with ideas that are present not just in Britten but in much older examples of the form.

Keith Bruce