Like Nyman’s earlier opera Man and Boy: Dada (6/05), Love Counts has a libretto by Michael Hastings, uses the Michael Nyman Band directed by Paul McGrath, and comes out on Nyman’s own label. The opera was commissioned by the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe, and premiered in 2005; this recording is of the Almeida Theatre production last year.

The two characters in Love Counts meet in improbable circumstances. Avril is a college lecturer in mathematics and Patsy is a boxer. She comes across him as she is cycling to work and he is punching at some branches of a tree. When she finds he has to ask the driver to tell him the number of the bus he is waiting for, she realises he cannot read or understand figures. Avril has been divorced from a marriage where she was abused, and gradually this improbable couple comes together as she tries to persuade him to give up boxing before he is damaged further. She works hard helping him to understand figures; they become lovers; but the lure of boxing is too great and he ends up in a wheelchair after a pasting from someone he was teaching. At the end he gets his figures right and so Avril has won.

The continuity of the dialogue is delivered against a busy background of regular rhythms – a tactic familiar from Adams’s Nixon in China, although Nyman does it in his own way – but there are moments of relative repose where Avril’s wish to reform Patsy is genuinely touching. One of the most curious aspects of Love Counts is that it is based on Bach chorale harmonisations, truncated, fractured and sometimes superimposed. This provides a strong bass-line, not always found inminimalist composers; but whatever would Bach have made of his sacred material being used as a backcloth to making love and discussions about sex?

Helen Williams has exactly the right quality to make Avril’s role compassionate and compelling, and Andrew Slater’s resonant bass is a good foil, although some of his lines are set slightly low when what he says needs to be heard. There are no sound effects – we don’t hear the telephone or Avril slapping Patsy – and the tracks should have been numbered on the second CD.