In the age of pandemic-driven musical streaming, chamber and even orchestral music can be managed with a little dexterity. Opera is considerably harder.

Harder, yes — but not impossible, as the elegant and efficient new offering from Opera San José clearly demonstrates. The company’s recorded production of “Three Decembers,” a compact chamber work by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, feels like a dexterous how-to for artistic operating within the age of COVID.

For the foreseeable future, at least, opera seems destined to be an intimate art form, closer in scale to a song recital than to anything involving grand theatrical effects. “Three Decembers,” which was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera in 2008 and came to Berkeley that year in a co-presentation by San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances, is a case in point.

It features just three characters, the domineering and self-absorbed theatrical grande dame Maddy Mitchell and her two grown children, Bea and Charlie. As the title suggests, the work unfolds over three Christmases, featuring plenty of arguing and reminiscences but not much stage action.

And its casting requirements are perfectly suited for Opera San José, a blend of one established star with two younger performers from the company’s troupe of resident artists.

The star is mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, stepping into a role created for Frederica von Stade and making it her own with the kind of effortless hauteur that Maddy herself would recognize. In Graham’s blazing performance, Maddy emerges with a winning combination of heedlessness and vulnerability; you can detect both the strong-willed vanity and the emotional neediness that have sustained her career as an actress and a single mother.

Matching her step for step, the next generation of Mitchells are soprano Maya Kherani and baritone Efraín Solís. Both performers show a profound grasp of the stylistic demands of Heggie’s score — its lyrical melodic contours and its periodic bursts of expressive urgency — and there’s a touching emotional flow to their interactions as siblings.

Heggie’s music emerges repeatedly as the focal point of the entire undertaking. Conducted by Christopher James Ray in a two-piano version of the score (the deft accompanists are Veronika Agranov-Dafoe and Sunny Yoon), it’s a buoyant, strikingly resourceful creation that gets at the work’s emotional undercurrents with deceptive directness.

The melodies land with light but sure-footed precision (one stand-alone number, a ballad from Maddy’s otherwise unseen Tony Award-winning turn, is a knockout). Heggie’s ability to blend two or three voices together into a radiant weave keeps paying dividends. Best of all, perhaps, is the rhythmic vitality of the writing — Heggie never lapses into the drab mid-tempo speechifying that makes so much contemporary opera hard to take.

All the music needs is a dramatic structure worthy of its vibrancy. Instead, Scheer’s libretto (based on a play by the late Terrence McNally, to whose memory the broadcast is dedicated) runs aground in a blur of pallid resentments and intergenerational squabbles.

The children’s grievances against Maddy — her reluctance to accept Charlie’s homosexuality, her disregard of Bea’s marital difficulties, her general neglect of both in favor of her career — may be well-founded, but they’re rarely dramatized enough to register as more than whining. And the final scene, at Maddy’s funeral, simply wishes away the entire drama in a rush of posthumous forgiveness.

Director Tara Branham does what she can with the material, but what generates the most sparks is the production’s fluid use of camerawork to expand the performing space. From the long opening tracking shot (which follows Ray to the podium like a nod to the famous Copacabana entrance in “Goodfellas”) through a series of skillful shifts in location, the action moves hither and yon without disrupting the basic sense of place.

This “Three Decembers” (featuring a choice of subtitles in English, Spanish and Vietnamese) demonstrates the possibilities for technology to help see us through the obstacles facing the performing arts during this treacherous period. It’s a model that other companies might do well to emulate.

“Three Decembers”: Available for streaming beginning Thursday, Dec. 3. $40-$50 per household. 408-437-4450. www.operasj.org