Tuesday night at Sanders Theatre, Fort Worth Opera presented what is surely this year’s most significant area operatic event—and possibly the most significant theatrical event as well—with the opening performance of a new production of Philip Glass’s Hydrogen Jukebox.

The most significant element in the production is, of course, the opera itself, a setting of an arrangement of pre-existing texts by Allen Ginsberg (1926-97). Some composers have a gift for setting the words of a particular poet, and for making that poetry even better with music—as, for instance, Schubert’s elevation of the poetry of Wilhelm Müller, or Vaughan Williams’ illumination of texts by Robert Louis Stevenson. Although Ginsberg’s poetry is, arguably, stronger than that of either Müller or Stevenson, in Hydrogen Jukebox, it takes on an even greater power. Glass has a knack for finding just the right rhythm and pitch patterns to underline, in just the right way, subtle points within the text. (The fierce weather outside, which sent the audience scurrying to the cellar twice during Tuesday’s performance, made these words, near the opening, particularly apt: “Twenty years ago approaching Texas I saw sheet lightning cover Heaven’s corners.”)

Dan Kempson in front with Rosa Betancourt, Corrie Donovan, Jonathan Blalock, and Amanda Robie (Photo courtesy: Ron T. Ennis)

Hydrogen Jukebox is, to this listener’s ears, one of the more eclectic and fascinating of Glass’s scores. There is plenty of the characteristic repeated-broken chord figuration and glacially slow harmonic rhythm that is most commonly associated with Glass, and that he has used frequently to create a trance-like state in his listeners. But there’s also a wider variety of styles, and a more frequent shifting of textures and harmonies, right down to the unaccompanied, quasi-hymn-spiritual that closes the piece with a Whitmanesque paean to Death.

Structurally, Hydrogen Jukebox is not an opera at all, but a set of twenty ensemble pieces. It was up to director Lawrence Edelson and production designer Anya Klepikov to produce a sense of trajectory—not  necessarily plot—out of Ginsberg’s brilliant poetic ramblings and Glass’s relentless score. Klepikov arranged the room as a sort of miniature basketball arena, with two sets of bleachers (each seating approximately fifty onlookers) facing each other across a space dominated by ladders and a railroad track. On either wall, projected still photos and moving pictures (produced by C. Andrew Bauer) constantly explored themes of violence (with actual film of executions by firing squads and scattered corpses), as well as other profound themes related to the text. If this sounds, in description, a little heavy-handed, the actual effect was, on the contrary, constantly thought-provoking.

Rosa Betancourt, Justin Hopkins, Amanda Robie, Corrie Donovan, Jonathan Blalock, Dan Kempson (Photo courtesy: Ron T. Ennis)

Six singers (baritone Dan Kempson, sopranos Rosa Betancourt and Corrie Donovan, mezzo-soprano Amanda Robie, tenor Jonathan Blalock, and bass Justin Hopkins) moved across this bleak field of dreams in costumes ranging from combat fatigues to near-nudity, all the while singing beautifully and often powerfully. Hopkins’s delivery of a spoken monologue at the end of Act I was particularly powerful. Steven Osgood, in the manner of Glass himself, conducted the small orchestra of six players from one of two electronic keyboards.

During his long career, Ginsberg served as a sort of Jeremiah on the American cultural scene, casting, with cold eye and searing words a light on an America very different from the one portrayed constantly in political rhetoric and only unintentionally revealed in our massive popular and commercial culture. Although premiered in 1990, and based on poetry written from as far back as the immediate post-World War II era, the truths of Hydrogen Jukebox, with its refusal to accept or, ultimately, to reject that vast spiritual dream world we call “America,” are, if anything, more frightening and compelling than ever.

Image at top: Dan Kempson, Rosa Betancourt, Justin Hopkins, Amanda Robie, Jonathan Blalock (Photo courtesy: Ron T. Ennis)