City Opera Vancouver ends its current season with a four-performance run of Sophia’s Forest, a new opera by Lembit Beecher and Hannah Moscovitch, which opened Thursday evening at SFU Downtown’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.

The term indie opera is ambiguous, but Sophia’s Forest can productively be described as such: an intimate one-act proposition with a small cast and instrumental backup of string quartet plus percussion and electronics. The taut libretto is a fairly conventional memory play about family trauma amid some non-specific geopolitical horror; the music is a well-crafted sequence of short, interconnected vignettes that unfold with purposeful intensity.

For almost two decades now, City Opera Vancouver has championed works exploring contemporary themes and social justice. While

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