The surprising musical approaches Mr. Spears often takes to these scenes, and the characters, hooked me right through. In a composer’s note, he describes his musical language as combining two disparate styles: American minimalism and the courtly, melismatic singing of medieval troubadours. Mr. Spears’s evocations of troubadours sometimes sound, intriguingly, like they have come by way of Ravel, or Britten, or Judy Collins. There are hints of neo-Classical Stravinsky, stretches of Baroque-like dance, a red-hot clarinet. Whole stretches of the score are driven by pulsing rhythmic figures and repetitive riffs that envelop Tim and Hawk in scary bliss, or, more menacingly, tap into the hysteria gripping the government.

Mr. Spears takes risks, right from the first tender, complex meeting between the two men. Tim (the appealing, youthful tenor Aaron Blake), just arrived from New York, is sitting on a bench in a park, all eager to work in government. The suave, confident Hawk (Joseph Lattanzi, a mellow-voiced, charismatic baritone), senses something about him, and begins a ritual of seduction.