Any new operatic adaptation of Brief Encounter can’t help but face barriers, sociological and otherwise. The classic 1945 film about an illicit but chaste affair between two married middle-aged, middle-class persons revolves around a sexual repression and genteel romanticism that are quite foreign to the 21st century – my reaction, at least, upon revisiting the world crafted by David Lean’s direction and Noël Coward’s screenplay. Also, listeners lacking sympathy for current neo-tonal operas won’t love this one, especially since, at its 2009 Houston Grand Opera premiere, it was widely observed that the score’s central motif quotes Leonard Bernstein’s “Make Our Garden Grow”.

Some 30 minutes into the opera not one of those barriers existed. This is the score I’ve been waiting for Previn to write ever since his 1984 Piano Concerto, which begins so arrestingly but lapses into second-hand ideas – a case of his compositional facility working against him. His works have steadily become more consistent and personal, though A Streetcar Named Desire, for all its luscious arias, was stymied (and slowed) by an overly wordy libretto. Words are less important (and numerous) in Brief Encounter’s portrait of inner upheaval – one that Previn’s music reveals with a richness that cinema cannot.

The score’s basic palette is upper range, mezzo-piano string-writing with harmonies that are winningly amorphous but not expressively vague. For all the certainty of the characters’ routine-laden outside lives, their romantic dilemma is so hopeless that the music never has anything close to a conventional harmonic resolution.

Incidental solos need not be imposing to project eloquent strokes of characterisation, such as the mellow, woozy glissandos that accompany the guilty couple’s champagne luncheon. John Caird’s libretto, which intelligently departs from the film in ways great and small, is mostly short singable lines, using mundane pleasantries as the thinnest veneer for what lies underneath. Even the external musical descriptions that take Previn back to his film-score roots – like the chugging trains that take the couple in opposite directions – have an extra poetic dimension that keeps them from seeming overly obvious.

The opera’s grand dimensions and intimate manner are a challenge for anyone playing lead characters. Even with a generous vibrato that gives her medium-weight voice extra scale, Elizabeth Futral achieves a degree of emotional specificity that makes her one of the best singing actresses around. Nathan Gunn matches her with a baritone that scales down to practically nothing – important in a love story in which the man is the needier of the two. Also important is Kim Josephson’s touching portrait of Laura’s husband that tells you that their marriage wasn’t a mistake.

The recording’s problem is mainly balance: the orchestra feels far from the singers; it’s even hard to access Patrick Summers’s conducting. In this opera, voices and instruments must hug each other.