If Susan Kander and Roberta Gumbel’s dwb (driving while black) had premiered as scheduled two months before the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, it might have been lost in the growing but still muted din of classical music responding to the country’s racial crisis. A year later, set against the graphic details of the trial in Minneapolis, the opera’s portrayal of a black mother’s journey into fear as her son grows up and approaches driving age provides a road map to living ‘handcuffed on the ground’. Its consoling lullaby is an iconically memorable ‘My beautiful brown boy … you are not who they see’. Its closing mantra is: ‘It’s not a question of if, my son, but when’.

dwb tells its story in 13 scenes and seven news ‘bulletins’ during which Gumbel and New Morse Code, the remarkably inventive and resourceful duo of cellist Hannah Collins and percussionist Michael Compitello, chronicle reality with unblinking intensity. One moment the son is playing innocently with his toys, the next moment the mother sings a painful anguished vocalise accompanied by Collins, rising ever higher without ever being able to scream, and Compitello gonging out.

dwb only begins to make its full impact in an audio recording because what Kander as the composer and Gumbel, both as librettist and performer, have expressed with such economical means in their recording of the virtual world premiere – presented in October by Baruch Performing Arts Center in New York City and Opera Omaha – really needs to be seen.