Cast of “A Month in the Country.” Photo by Carol Rosegg.

For its fall production, the Manhattan School of Music (MSM) Opera Theater retrieved a true American operatic rarity, albeit just 40 years old, in Lee Hoiby’s “A Month in the Country,” after Ivan Turgenev’s play of the same name. Hoiby’s opera was given a premiere, billed as “Natalia Petrovna,” for its heroine, by the New York City Opera on October 8, 1964, had performances in Washington, D.C., the following season, and was not heard again until it was produced in Boston in 1981, under the current title.

A heated romantic melodrama, with some seriously comic interludes, this unabashedly tonal opera, with occasional waltzes, deserves this new lease on life for, despite a knotty plot replete with complicated Russian names, the creative forces involved—composer Hoiby, late librettist William Ball, director Ned Canty, conductor Steven Osgood, and a committed cast— immediately make plain and absorbing all characters’ identities and their idées fixes . The first night was December 8, with repetitions set for the 10^th and the 12^th matinee.

Like “Dialogues des Carmélites” and “Siegfried,” “A Month in the Country” tells its tale largely through its striking encounters and confrontations between two characters at a time, with ensembles just coming near or at the ends of acts. Countess Natalia Petrovna Islaeva, beautiful, bored, and alluring to all, presides over a curious household, in Central Russia in the summer of 1860, where intrigue, inconvenient affections, manipulation and jealousy abound. Jenny Rebecca Winans, a commanding young soprano, plays Natalia.

Her friend and confidante is Mihail Mihailovitch Rakitin, hopelessly in love with her and sung by bass Charles Temkey, who impresses here as he did in last season’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “ Mirandolina” and seems destined for a major career. Rakitin, whom Natalia calls Michel, is a writer and, no doubt, Turgenev’s mouthpiece. A program note by Mark Shulgasser indicates that the Russian playwright “ spent much of his life in Europe, notably as an awkward appendage to the household of … mezzo-soprano … Pauline Viardot-Garcia, whom he adored” and Michel maintains a similar position in the Islaev mansion. At one point, Natalia observes that her husband, Arkady Sergeitch Islaev, offstage, is “riding his horse backwards. He’ll be killed!” (he isn’t) reminding that Viardot’s no-less-famous diva sister, Maria Malibran, died from injuries incurred after being thrown to the ground by her horse.

Natalia and Michel are looking for diversion, when into their lives comes Alexei Alexeivitch Belaev, hired as a tutor for her young son, Kolia (Jeremy Cohen). Alexei is as adored by the women as the Countess is by the men and is sung in a polished baritone by Liam Bonner. The country scholar causes the aristocratic Natalia to lose her composure in a way that Michel, whom she playfully calls her “big, bad bear,” never could inspire. In a pair of emotional outpourings, Alexei confesses to all he wants to be for her, while she finds herself increasingly tormented by this illicit love.

Cherishing all-but-unrequited feeling for Alexei is Natalia’s niece and ward, Vera Alexandrovna, vividly portrayed by soprano Yoosun Park, unwitting Aida to her calculating aunt’s Amneris, as Natalia slyly depicts herself as Vera’s ally in order to elicit her confession of love for Alexei. Jealous Michel has a similar duet with Alexei concerning Natalia.

Tenor Alex Boyer plays Count Arkady, Natalia’s clueless husband, so preoccupied with a dam he is building that he not only fails to notice that he bores his wife to distraction, but also misses or misinterprets most of the drama swirling around their home. He is firmly under the thumb of his mother, Anna Semyonovna, a richly comic character effectively played by mezzo-soprano Sarah Williams. Both are convinced it is Michel, and not Alexei, who has caused Natalia to stray and Mama Anna is ready to challenge the writer to a duel herself. By the end of the evening, the timid find their tongues: Vera declares herself her aunt’s “foe,” her “rival” (shades, again, of Aida and Amneris) and Arkady stuns his meddling mother (who styles her straying daughter-in-law a “Jezebel”) by calling her a “baboon.”

In other light-hearted moments, tenor Jon-Michael Ball as Dr. Shpigelsky, a quack successfully courts high coloratura soprano Vivian Krich-Brinton as Lizaveta Bogdanova, Anna’s companion, and sees profit in matching up tenor Matthew Peña, as Fyodorov, a wealthy if decrepit landowner, with young Vera. Boyer, Williams, Ball, Krich-Brinton and Peña, quite in tears at the surprising turns of events, join for an amusing quintet before the serious final farewells. Alexei has been dismissed, leaving both Natalia and the newly affianced Vera bereft. Devastated that Natalia has shown for the student the love she has long denied him, Michel prepares to depart and is given the blessings of even those whose hostility he had incurred, but not that of Natalia. Just he, his hostess and her niece understand the import of what has occurred and, in the haunting finale, the characters probe their alienation.

The cast plays out the drama and comedy in a set by Michael Schweikardt in which a grand staircase and a thriving greenhouse successfully suggest a great estate. Elizabeth Hope Clancy designed the period costumes, Peter West devised the lighting, and Jennifer Mooney prepared wigs and makeup.

In the spring, MSM will investigate an early 19 ^th century operatic rarity, Louis Spohr’s “Zemire und Azor,” a retelling of the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Dates are April 11, 13 and 15.

December 8 & 10 at 8 p.m., 12 at 2:30 p.m.

120 Claremont Avenue