“I am but a stranger here, Heaven is my home.” Though the Communist avant-garde composer Luigi Nono might have bridled at the thought, the world view of the old spiritual and that of his first opera, commissioned for the 1961 Venice Biennale, have much in common. Nono’s hero or antihero is a miner who once fled his native land but now wants to go back. The scenes of his journey form a godless 90-minute mid-century Stations of the Cross. The central role of the Migrant, originally sung by the sunny lyric tenor Petre Munteanu, of Romania, now falls to the jumpier Sri Lankan American Sean Panikkar, an artist without borders. Expect discomforting parallels to Hong Kong, Belarus, Syria, Brazil, South Africa, and dare we say the United States of America? Ingo Metzmacher, a master at locating the human heart as well as the brute power in apocalyptic scores, conducts. —M.G.