Sasha Matson’s jazz opera Cooperstown, to a libretto by the composer and Mark Miller, is an inventive and winning chamber opera scored for a jazz quintet and five soloists, in which baseball provides both the setting for the action and the metaphorical context for the various relationships and romances of the characters. Cooperstown is a conventional operatic love story articulated in jazz instrumentation that underscores traditional lyrical vocal writing. It is dramatically predictable, but fascinatingly offbeat in musical terms, and as such it manages to hold the listener’s interest throughout.

Composer Sasha Matson, who hails from California but now makes his home in Cooperstown, NY, has written an infectious score, inspired by 1950s jazz quintet sound in which the nine scenes or “innings” of the opera are each introduced by an instrumental prelude, seguing into the dialogue and solos. Matson’s vocal writing is largely melodic and grateful for the voices, often sounding like Argento, Corigliano, or even late 19th-century models with a dusting of blues, cabaret, torch songs, and Latin jazz thrown in. He conducts the excellent quintet with an astute feeling for both the transparency of the work and the compelling rhythmic thrust.

Mark Miller, together with Matson, has created the tight libretto, which uses a mixture of rhyme and prose, together with a palette of symbols and images drawn from America’s national sport. Some of these are poetic, such as the act I love duet for Angel and Lilly, in which the baseball diamond symbolizes the diamond with which he would pledge his love; others, such as Jan’s repeated references to playing and losing, become a little trite. Overall, he shapes some romantic and emotional textual moments that come to life in the intensity and sincerity of Matson’s music. The chief reservations about the plot structure are that the central romance of Angel and Lilly, even accepting it as opera logic, has a sense of not being developed sufficiently and Marvin’s jealousy not given enough of a backstory to make the ending as tragic as one might like. Even though it is likely that both composer and librettist wanted a shorter work, another scene or two might remedy these quibbles.

The performance recorded here, however, is first-class, with excellent instrumentalists, especially pianist Sean Wayland, and luxury casting for the five roles. Rod Gilfrey uses his rich, warm, chocolate baritone with his customary incisiveness to give a commanding performance as the team manager Dutch Schulhaus. The young tenor Daniel Montenegro displays a secure, even lyrical range and enough ardor to make the superstar pitcher Angel Corazon believable. Tenor Daniel Favela takes on the role of the jealous catcher, Marvin Wilder, with a musical theater approach that works for the scheming character. Carin Gilfrey endows the sports agent, Jan, with a creamy mezzo of remarkable beauty that runs the gamut from romanza to torch song. Julie Adams brings her lovely coloratura soprano to the delicate and dreamy Lilly. All five singing-actors are comfortable in the mixed idioms of their music and in the moments of dialogue, and they work together to make a formidable ensemble.

Vocal highlights of the opera include the Inning Two duet for Lilly and Angel, Marvin’s Inning Three Arioso “There’s the game in their heads, ” Jan’s poignant Inning Five solo, “I will not lose my final chance,” Dutch’s wistful and knowing aria in Inning Six, “We live in a meadow of green,” while Angel’s final inning solo “What can we believe in?” and subsequent paean to love, “A golden autumn evening,” makes his collapse all the more wrenching. Finally, there is Dutch’s mellifluously sung last aria that sounds the requiem for the characters’ loves and for the frail Angel, “It breaks your heart.” Instrumentally, one especially enjoys the onstage jazz band improvisation which opens Inning Two in the sports bar, the melancholy saxophone accompaniment to Jan’s nostalgic musings in Inning Three, and the bluesy introduction to Inning Eight.

The recording is something of a miracle of modern engineering and producing, set down without always having all five singers together at once and recording the band in a New York City studio and the vocals in a California one. Despite these realities of modern studio recording, the project has a unified sound and aural ambiance. It is intimate, rounded and resonant and captures the bloom and velvet of the voices as well as the textured playing of the musicians. Albany accompanies the album with helpful notes, artist biographies, and the complete libretto.

Cooperstown offers a captivating listening experience, and there are enough delights in the recording to wish that some venue might wish to mount a live production! Highly recommended to jazz and opera lovers alike—not to mention baseball fans!