The rest is given over to a surging sci-fi rumination on the idea of exploration, writ large. A scientist in a wheelchair (inspired by Stephen Hawking) embodies intellectual courage; interplanetary travelers crash-land their spaceship on an ancient Earth, and wonder whether they should have studied law instead. This sprawling concept inspired some of Mr. Glass’s most feverish orchestral writing up to that point — and the performance of the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, a pre-eminent Glass champion, with the Bruckner Orchester Linz finds delirium in the heat.

‘Orphée’ (1993)

The first in another trilogy, this one based on Cocteau films, offered Mr. Glass a chance to lighten up. Cocteau’s surrealism, by turns sprightly and lightly self-pitying, generates high spirits in the opera, as when jaunty music enlivens the scene of cafe-life bohemia that opens this adaptation of the Orpheus myth. But the conductor Anne Manson and the Portland Opera musicians make sure that Mr. Glass’s talent for love music also comes through — as it does in “Akhnaten.”