Admirers of Michael Nyman, a British composer most famous for his scores to a clutch of Peter Greenaway films (including The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover) and Jane Campion’s The Piano, will be happy to know that the floodgates have finally opened: Nyman has reclaimed his old recordings for release on his own label, MN Records, now available in the U.S. via Naxos. Along with the many important reissues have come new releases, among them his most recent opera, Love Counts.

Built around an unlikely love affair between Patsy, an illiterate boxer felled by a kind of numerical dyslexia, and Avril, a mathematician, Love Counts is a two-act study in opposites attracting. In Michael Hastings’s eloquent libretto, each character bristles with dimensions that run against type: The boxer, first seen punching a tree, is a sweet but frustrated puppy dog for whom his sport is an inescapable calling, while the bookish mathematician has a history of violence.

Nyman’s beautifully relentless score, written for his own small ensemble, is nimbly conducted here by Paul McGrath. Patsy’s sad tale of his own mind’s betrayal uses (and fascinatingly abuses) the far-off music of Bach, in the same way that Dr. P., an Alzheimer’s patient in Nyman’s previous opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, told his tale via Nyman’s appropriation of Schumann. The device captures your attention while holding you at a distance, often to sad or disarming effect.