Whatever the future holds for the Ohio Opera Theatre, it can proudly claim to have begun life with a world premiere. The new company, which will present fully staged operas in Canton beginning next year, made its performing debut Friday night with Light Fantastic, a new piece commissioned for the occasion from noted composer Daron Hagen. The 40-minute cantata also marks the opening of an exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art, 'Visions into the 21st Century: The New Age of Holography.'

Before beginning, Hagen explained to the capacity audience at Cable Recital Hall that the piece, set to poems about light, is also about the human life cycle of childhood, death and rebirth. The texts take the listener from evening through night to morning. Hagen wrote the piece for the forces at hand: a children's chorus, tenor soloist (sung by Barry Busse, the company's education director) and a 10-piece orchestra. The piece contains some beautiful lyric moments and is written in a harmonic style that is adventurous, but not harsh. Sometimes lines clashed and muddied each other Friday night, but it was hard to tell if that was intentional.

The piece opens and closes with repetitions of the phrase 'Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile,' from Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost. (The line means, roughly, that searching for truth can blind one to the truth. It makes more sense in the play's context than in isolation.) The children's chorus, prominent in this section, sounded tentative, as if the singers were waiting for someone else to take the lead. The standout was Hagen's orchestral line, whose music alternately soared and gently rocked underneath the vocalists' repeated lines. The real spine-tingling music came in the second section, a rhapsodic description of sunset by Walt Whitman that Hagen's music catches perfectly. Mysteriously, the music sounds at once dangerously intimate and impossibly distant, with yearning harmonies underlying a popular-sounding melody.

An orchestral interlude, 'The Light at Midnight,' sounded like no other night music you've ever heard, with forceful irregular rhythms and tense harmonies. Hagen explained afterward, 'I'm an insomniac from way back. ... This is the existential crisis, the dark night of the soul.' The following movement depicting sunrise, however, could be mistaken for nothing else. As the children repeatedly hummed a falling interval, the orchestra added a vibrant but tranquil theme that easily could be imagined as light near the horizon, changing by the minute. The cantata concludes in much the same mood, as Hagen coaxed a gorgeous, dead-on unified crescendo out of his forces to end on an up note.