With a half dozen operas to his credit over the past 12 years, Gregory Spears has emerged as a critics’ darling. His deftly scripted Fellow Travelers (2016), adapted from Thomas Mallon’s novel of the “lavender scare” in McCarthy-era Washington, has come in for particular praise, and justly so. The instrumentals pull onward like the broad, deep current of a mighty river, its glassy surface asparkle with strangely baroque swirls and ripples that also animate the hymnic writing for the voices. There’s a narcotic quality to the Spears idiom that seems eminently suited to the new The Righteous, which transposes Biblical themes of faith, power, and ambition to the Southwest of the 1980s. The central figure is David (the baritone Michael Mayes), a charismatic preacher man catapulted by happenstance to the heights of worldly power. His cat’s-cradle of family ties is straight out of Tennessee Williams. As in the Old Testament, a friend named Jonathan (the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo) has a wrenching role to play. The libretto of The Righteous is by the Pulitzer Prize-winning 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith, who acknowledges the inspiration of the Psalms (okay) and notes a fondness for the self-circling, quintessentially undramatic poetic form of the villanelle (relevance to The Righteous nebulous in the extreme). Jordan de Souza conducts. —Matthew Gurewitsch