Ellen Reid's opera p r i s m (the lowercase, spaced styling is the preference of the composer and the librettist) was premiered by the Los Angeles Opera in 2018 and immediately gained wide attention, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year. This is its first recording, and although the staging might have brought an immediacy that the recording cannot, this is true to some extent of any opera. It is a chamber work, in three short acts with two voice parts, an offstage chorus, and 14 instrumentalists, on the subject of sexual assault, which both Reid and librettist Roxie Perkins have stated that they have experienced. The subject couldn't have been timelier than it was in 2018 and 2019, but the way the opera is constructed may well be timeless. The libretto depicts the post-traumatic stress reactions of a young woman and her mother to the former's assault in a nightclub, and the composer and librettist worked closely together over a period of several years to forge a musical-textual language capable of depicting these reactions. In the first act, mother and daughter inhabit a "sanctuary" with a dreamlike, impressionistic musical language. The second act is set in the nightclub itself, with Reid merging techno music and contemporary styles in a way that must have taken a great deal of experimentation to work out. In this act and in the finale, Reid and Perkins depict the emergence of fragmentary memories characteristic of the aftermath of sexual assault, and this, too, is extremely powerful and original. The two singers here, Anna Schubert (soprano, as Bibi, the daughter) and Rebecca Jo Loeb (mezzo, as Lumee, the mother), were those heard in the original production. That production will surely not be the last, but until others come along, it is worth seeking out this recording of a work that is among the operatic milestones of the 2010s decade.