This third version of John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West brings it tantalisingly near boiling point after seven years of simmering through revisions since its premiere in 2017.

Set in California during the 1849 Gold Rush that drew unprecedented numbers of fortune seekers from around the world, the resulting influx created, as Mark Twain observed, “the only population of its kind that the world has ever seen gathered together”.

That pluralism transformed the El Dorado State into an ethnic and economic crucible, one  that fermented many of the inter-racial antagonisms that are again assaulting the contemporary world. It also explains the musical polyglotism of Adams’ score. Infused with accents of Stravinskyan dissonance throughout, Mahler at its end, occasional hints of Weber and, if you can believe it, Gilbert and Sullivan along the way, there are also echoes of folk songs and ballads producing passages where you would be forgiven for thinking that Charles Ives had composed them. It all coalesces into something that is as much cinematic as it is operatic.

With...