A ‘Voice’ with meditative flair

It has taken a few years, but the Philip Glass opera “The Sound of a Voice” has made its logical westward migration to the Pacific Rim. Premiered in 2003 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., this operatic double-header is based on two one-act plays from the early ‘80s -- “Sound of a Voice” and “Hotel of Dreams” -- by Los Angeles-born playwright David Henry Hwang, inspired by Japanese cinema and dealing with old and new Japan, though in decidedly poetic terms.

Considering its narrative focus, the work found a resonant home for its West Coast premiere at the Japan America Theater on Saturday (with an additional performance slated to take place Sunday). Leave it to the Long Beach Opera to pull it off with aptly minimal, meditative flair.

In the Glass-Hwang collaboration, the power of pairing works on multiple levels. Glass’ restrained and mannered music and Hwang’s text engage in the same kind of wary but ultimately affectionate relationship as the two characters in each tale (played by the same singers, soprano Suzan Hanson and bass-baritone Herbert Perry).

A minimalist in his way, Hwang packs multiple thematic suggestions into coolly limited settings. In “Sound of a Voice,” a mysterious, reclusive woman in the mountains interacts cryptically with an old samurai, while “Hotel of Dreams” tells the surreal tale of a brothel where lonely, elderly men literally sleep with young women who have been drugged. In both, male-female dynamics alternate between civility, subtle codes of courting and tragic romantic abandon in which suicide is in the vocabulary of possibilities.

Pairing also defines Glass’ cross-cultural gesture of including the Japanese shakuhachi and the Chinese pipa in the orchestra, stressing an East-West synthesis, which doesn’t always come together seamlessly in the score (neatly realized by an orchestra led by Long Beach Opera artistic director Andreas Mitisek). Glass’ familiar locomotion language, with simple harmonic material and math-nerd rhythmic subdivisions, a basic syntax he has relied on for more than 30 years, is also in check. Part of his ingenuity involves his insertion of his redundant style into ever-new contexts. Here is yet another fresh niche.

One connective factor in the project is Robert Israel’s spare stage set for the two halves of the evening, treated with delineating but also cohesive style by director Robert Woodruff. A large, white cube covered with translucent fabric, functioning alternately as a recluse’s dwelling and the stairway to the unseen, is dramatically tilted, in keeping with the tilted angles and myth-like disorientation of the stories.

In Glass’ concept for the piece, the respective elements of the opera and theater come together, without falling into one medium or the other. Perry and Hanson smartly realize that concept, offering performances at once empathetic and crisply stylized. Grand operatic gestures are checked at the door. Perry invoked melancholic grace in his roles, and Hanson was especially moving as the seductive, wise and also dangerous recluse.

Graced by several artists from the original ART production -- Hanson, Perry, Israel and Woodruff -- Glass’ opera has officially gone west now. The impression was mostly a bold one and a bit mystifying, true to the work’s hypnotic, enigmatic form.