This two-act opera dates from the year after Philip Glass’s Akhnaten but is little known, although there were several productions at the time. This recording is of the premiere given by Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater, which commissioned the work and launched it at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985.

The macabre fairy tale by the brothers Grimm is given a slightly different slant in Arthur Yorinks’s libretto. It’s a version of the wicked-stepmother scenario. As a second wife, she hates her stepson so much that she arranges for him to be decapitated by the lid of a huge trunk, contrives to blame her own daughter and then boils the boy’s body up into a stew, relished by the father. Birds have a supernatural role in the story and the situation is rescued by one of them improbably dropping a millstone on the wicked woman.

Glass is accustomed to collaborative projects but this time he worked with a fellow composer. Robert Moran studied at Mills College and in Vienna: this was his first venture into opera and more followed. He and Glass shared out the sections in The Juniper Tree – an odd partnership since they made no attempt to assimilate their contrasted styles.

Moran, who gets all of the second act after the first eight minutes, covers the melodramatics with relish and then relaxes into the touching happy ending. Glass is typically more austere. The thoroughly capable singers and ensemble make a strong case for Glass’s first opera to an English text. The CD booklet consists of libretto but no notes.