Babies suffer a dire fate in opera – tossed into the fire (Il trovatore) or thrown under the ice (Jenůfa) – their innate innocence raising the dramatic stakes just about as high as they can go. In Baby Kintyre (2009), the infant has already been dead more than 80 years when found in the floorboards of a Toronto house, its identity completely unknown with no DNA trail to follow. So the opera’s drama centres around the many unknown factors while revelations dribble out, one by one, in the style of a 1940s radio serial, its periodic cliffhangers translating well to chamber opera.

With a remarkably convincing dramatic tone, librettist/composer Dean Burry parcelled the story into episodes, framing it with the present-day characters who speak more than sing as they discover the child, but with mostly sung flashbacks into a narrative assembled from hazy memories and feverish speculation. Hyper-realistic sound effects characteristic of radio serials provide the invisible scenic design. The homey, candid, plain-spoken qualities of the libretto keep the genre from seeming too contrived, while the music (which weaves in popular songs of the 1920s, including ‘By the light of the silvery moon’) so completely seizes on every dramatic situation (though with a light touch) you hardly notice the lack of any harmonic stability. Cast members are all convincing radio actors who are able to project complete personalities into their spoken and sung voices, most especially Eileen Nash as a girl who grew up in the house and asks a lot of questions the adults around here don’t want to answer.

Though plenty engaging and effective in it own modest terms, the opera doesn’t feel complete. With the baby’s death so central to the plot, the opera needs to suggest how its characters weighed their options. As it is, you’re left assuming a lot, mainly that the baby didn’t have a proper burial because it was born out of wedlock. How were the characters able to live with it? Might that be another episode? As it is, the only satisfying resolution is found in the disc’s appendix, which has two Canadian Broadcasting Company radio segments about the real-life incident and the eventful emotional journey of the man who found the baby.