Firebird Motel: Chamber opera. Music by David Conte. Libretto by David Yezzi. Directed by Tony Kelly. (Through Dec. 7. Thick Description at Thick House, 1695 18th St., San Francisco. One hour. Tickets $15-$25. Call (415) 401-8081 or visit www.thickdescription.org.)

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It isn't every day -- it doesn't happen in many a season actually -- that a theater company commissions and opens a new opera. And that's probably a very good thing. But Thick Description proves that it not only can be done but done rather well. Its premiere of David Conte's "Firebird Motel," which opened Monday at the company's Thick House, is a pretty compelling piece, remarkably well presented.

It isn't grand opera. "Firebird" is billed, accurately, as a chamber opera -- a piece, in this case, for five singers and only an hour long. But then, Thick D is a very small company, with aspirations and, often enough, achievements far beyond its size.

The vocal talent that Thick's director, Tony Kelly, and his company have assembled would be an impressive accomplishment at a much larger theater, quite apart from conductor Jeffrey Thomas' excellent five-piece chamber ensemble.

Something of a cross between a dramatic tone poem -- or perhaps an operatic meditation -- and a Gian Carlo Menotti-style minor melodrama, "Firebird" is an eventful night among the hopeless down-and-out denizens of a seedy semi-residential motel in the Mojave Desert. In David Yezzi's oddly slow- motion, action-packed libretto, the motel is both a haven of last resort and a death trap for hapless young women.

It's a place haunted by the ghost of Julie (a mellifluous Julie Queen, hovering above Mikiko Uesugi's strikingly minimal motel-lobbyset) -- a beloved resident who recently disappeared in the desert -- and by a predatory cop, Trooper (a smoldering Micah Epps with a sonorous bass-baritone),

Julie's abusive lover, whom everybody (including the ghost ) believes had more than a little to do with her disappearance. As Ivan, the chronically depressed night clerk (beautifully sung by tenor Mark Hernandez), watches helplessly, Trooper crudely demands sexual favors from his next victim, the waiflike Corina (Shawnette Sulker).

What happens next is pretty pure melodrama, complete with ghostly visit, Ivan's instant switch of romantic intent from Julie to Corina, his and desert woman Nova's (resonant mezzo Milissa Carey) attempts to save Corina, and a fatal shootout in the dark. It all takes place during a dark and stormy night, of course, as strikingly conveyed by Conte's score as by Rick Martin's dramatic lights.

Although Yezzi, a co-founder of Thick with Kelly and Martin, has written some richly evocative lyrics about the desert landscape and living in "waking oblivion" -- with cleverly handled interior rhymes -- he often stumbles into portentous pronouncements and clumsiness (as in Ivan's invocation of "a place where disgrace doesn't mark every face"). There are passages where Conte's score falls into similar traps .

For the most part, though, "Firebird" weaves a hypnotic spell. Conte's sinuously suggestive melodies, beautifully rendered by Thomas (the director of the American Bach Soloists) and the musicians, create a paradoxically lush impression of barren lives in a harsh environment and build gently, almost pensively, but inexorably toward the climax.

Plaintive solos alternate with vibrant duets and lustrous trios, occasionally punctuated on Ivan's radio by Conte's lovely (prerecorded) Christmas chorales, in an almost seamless creation.

Sulker is a standout, her expressive eyes radiating fear, defiance and hopelessness as she sings with heartbreaking poignancy in a crystalline soprano.

But all the singers are outstanding in their ability to invest their potently sung passages with distinct characterizations and dramatic immediacy.

While some of the recitative passages sound awkwardly prosaic, in concert, the performers' voices wrap around each other to spine-tingling effect.

Kelly has given the piece an evocative staging, setting off Cassandra Carpenter's artful desert-rat costumes against the backdrop of Uesugi's set, a stark motel lobby and wrap-around storm-swept desert. The story is pure pulp, but Conte's "Firebird" takes flight on the wings of its music.