Evgeny Nikitin as Klingsor in Wagner’s 'Parsifal.'

Before the season started, chatter among opera gossips would inevitably turn to the prediction of the biggest upcoming fiasco at the Metropolitan Opera.

Would it be Bartlett Sher’s opening-night production of Donizetti’s Elisir d’Amore? No, that would likely be dully inoffensive. Ditto David McVicar’s New Year’s Eve take on another Donizetti, Maria Stuarda.

Thomas Adès’s Tempest, in its Met premiere, would have the thrill of the new. David Alden’s stylized, out-
of-time version of Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera might be weird, the wags foretold, but Mr. Alden’s immense operatic experience would see it through.

Instead most of the talk landed on Michael Mayer’s new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, a pillar of the repertory that tells the story of a bitter jester at the Duke of Mantua’s court and his struggles to protect his blameless young daughter. The show would be a jangly, over-obvious updating (to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas) led by a Tony Award-winning director (Spring Awakening, American Idiot) trying his hand at opera for the first time. It had all the marks of what opera queens like to call filth.

What eventually made it to the stage on January 28, though, was not at all filthy. The rough skeleton of the updating made sense: the callously womanizing Duke became a Sinatra-like singer holding court at a casino. Christine Jones’s neon-filled set pulsed with light and color. There were no glaring embarrassments in either the direction or singing on a par with, say, Scarpia’s risible embrace of a statue of the Virgin Mary during Luc Bondy’s production of Puccini’s Tosca in 2009.

Far from being a fiasco, Mr. Mayer’s ingratiating Rigoletto, conducted by Michele Mariotti, made you want to like it. The only possible objection could come from an operagoer scandalized by the mere notion of a take on Verdi’s masterpiece not set in a naturalistic medieval castle and costumed in doublets, and that is the kind of person who the art form must continue to hope stays home and/or, since this is partly generational, fades away.

In fact, besides the visual aspect, there was little to distinguish the Met’s new production from a “traditional” one, and that is the beginning of the problem. The great operatic updatings—Peter Sellars’s Mozart/Da Ponte cycle in the 1980s is the classic example—involve a fundamental, ground-up rethinking of the work at hand.

Mr. Sellars did not just take the same old Così fan tutte and set it in a contemporary roadside diner in Massachusetts. Instead he used that unexpected (but, in terms of the libretto, completely reasonable) setting to break free of centuries of sclerotic Mozart performance traditions, to sharpen the characters’ relationships and recalibrate our sympathies.

“It’s not about style,” Mr. Sellars once told me. “It’s about content. Once you focus on content, then the stakes are real. What is the surface leading you to? That’s when it gets really serious.”

Mr. Mayer’s Rigoletto, intermittently entertaining and well-meaning to the core, never gets serious. Its problem was not the concept but the execution. Rather than using a new setting to find new sources of pressure and menace in one of the darkest operas in the repertory, the production was as charming, breezy and unaffecting as Piotr Beczala’s Duke. Neither Mr. Beczala nor Diana Damrau—girlish and poignant as Gilda, Rigoletto’s innocent daughter—veered far from the standard takes on these characters.

But more than almost any opera, this is a one-man show. (The Duke and Gilda can come across more as projections of Rigoletto’s fantasies and anxieties than as characters in their own rights.) And it is in its approach to the title character that Mr. Mayer’s version fails.

Reviewing the production in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini aptly observed that it leaves Rigoletto’s status in the Duke’s casino oddly ambiguous. Is he a Don Rickles type, alternately warming up and deflating the crowd? Maybe. Is he a middle-management figure in the organization? Who knows? We see only the barest and blandest of actions: he shuffles around at the opening, briefly takes the microphone, cracks a mild joke or two.

Without seeing Rigoletto’s cruelty, there is no logic in the crushing curse meted out on him by the count Monterone (whom Mr. Mayer has recast, offensively, as an Arab sheik). And there is no visible shift in personality from his court life to his home life with Gilda, the transition that defines Rigoletto’s character and gives him haunting nuance.

If the audience left the production with no real idea of Rigoletto’s role in this Las Vegas ecosystem or of the tensions that govern his tortured life, it seemed to be as much the fault of the baritone Željko Lučić as Mr. Mayer.

His voice elegant, smooth and unstrained, Mr. Lučić was nevertheless a dismal misfire. This should not have come as a surprise. He has, since his Met debut in 2006, appeared with the company more than 60 times, in finely vocalized and thoroughly boring performances.

He was a Rigoletto without fears or passions, and so this was a Rigoletto that lacked those things, too. His duets with his beloved Gilda were almost comical in their affectlessness. “Cortigiani,” the great second-act outburst against the courtiers that melts into helpless vulnerability, barely registered. Mr. Lučić sang all the notes, but he sang them without emotion.

With a blank space where Rigoletto was supposed to be, there was very little content around which to build a powerful show. (Diverting yet ultimately hollow, the production had a decidedly Las Vegas feel about it.) The most important sequences in the opera—the end of the first act, when Gilda is kidnapped by the Duke’s courtiers to get revenge on the despised Rigoletto, and the tragic third—were muddled.

The idea of turning the last act’s remote house into a seedy strip club after hours had potential, but more attention seemed to have been paid to the vintage car into which Gilda’s body is stuffed than to the blocking of her self-sacrifice. And when Mr. Lučić held his dead daughter in his arms and launched his final cry against Monterone’s curse, he might, given the lack of any palpable anger or hurt, have been complaining about losing a few dollars in the slot machines.

This Rigoletto, in the end, was far less odious than Michael Grandage’s cliché-ridden take on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which premiered in 2011. But both suffer from one of the biggest problems with Met productions lately: an emotional temperature hovering just above freezing.

A certain coolness afflicted even a far more successful show: François Girard’s production of Wagner’s Parsifal. Thoughtful, beautifully cast and a little chilly, this Parsifal, taken along with Willy Decker’s spare but vibrantly theatrical version of Verdi’s Traviata, summed up the extent of what seems to be possible these days at the Met.

Mr. Girard’s production, like Mr. Mayer’s, is an updating whose superficial changes try to mask a perspective on the opera that is essentially straightforward. He has set Wagner’s tale of the struggling circle of knights of the Holy Grail in a barren landscape under a sky of ominous clouds (the video is by Peter Flaherty).

The mood is less post-apocalyptic than imminently apocalyptic. Repeated visions of looming planets on an apparent collision course with Earth recalled Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, another epic about the search for meaning in a world that seems to have lost it. The knights are dressed in dark pants and white shirts, like Mormons or an evangelical prayer group.

When Parsifal enters the sorcerer Klingsor’s castle, he is descending into a vaginal cavern dripping with blood. In this production, women do not just play Klingsor’s temptresses, but also a group of wanderers strangely excluded from the knights’ rituals. Mr. Girard’s ending finally integrates them with the men, a moving metaphor of the rejuvenation of the cult.

Conducted by Daniele Gatti with an idiosyncratic deliberation that vacillated between profundity and indulgence, the cast was extremely strong. The standout was Peter Mattei, singing the head knight Amfortas (for the first time ever!) with deep feeling and rich, steady tone. The knight Gurnemanz is one of René Pape’s signature roles, and his voice remains rock-solid, his bearing noble.

With the Parsifal of Jonas Kaufmann, his voice settling further each year into baritonal depths, these three, though their voices are completely different, affectingly suggested a brotherhood. (Katarina Dalayman’s Kundry was not quite on their level.) Mr. Kaufmann’s talents are known to everyone in opera: his intelligence, lyrical phrasing and distinctive tone.

Yet he seemed to be cautiously pacing himself, and in the first act especially he occasionally seemed, well, bored—not so much depicting awkwardness as being awkward. Despite his good looks, he is not a riveting or entirely natural presence onstage, a liability in an opera with such long, reflective passages in which little or nothing happens.

Even quibbling about his performance, though, felt egregiously petty after hearing Mr. Lučić’s confounding Rigoletto. Mr. Kaufmann, at least, is always trying, and this Parsifal was heartening proof that the Met is, too.

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Kristine Opolais as Magda in Puccini’s 'La Rondine.' (Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

There are artists we wish were riveting, risky, charismatic performers—but they just aren’t. For years, Renée Fleming has paired a lusciously rich voice with the excitement of a bowl of Cream of Wheat.

Elīna Garanča’s mezzo-soprano is one of the most spectacularly smooth, even sounds in the world, but on stage she exudes a chilly dullness. Angela Meade, a rising soprano who can make dazzling musical challenges sound easy, always seems to think she’s singing the phone book.

Of course, the reverse is also true. The soprano Marina Poplavskaya has left me with some of the most fascinating, indelible moments I’ve had in a theater over the past few seasons. A single hand gesture in her performance as Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo was more harrowing than many singers’ entire evenings. But her ability to carry a tune is inconsistent—a liability in an opera singer.

Tests of this distinction between good and great—or, more accurately, between great and something ineffably more than that—arrived in New York at the very start of 2013, during a two-week period that brought two noted artists to the Metropolitan Opera: the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais.

The first has long been a house favorite. The second was appearing at the Met for the first time. Both of their vehicles—Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and Puccini’s La Rondine, respectively—sit on the sidelines of the repertory, lesser-known products of famous composers. (Maria Stuarda had never before been done at the Met.)

They were two of the most anticipated performances of the season. Ms. DiDonato, 43, has made a crucial move for a mezzo: from the charming, adorable characters with which she made her reputation—Rosina, Octavian, Cherubino—to what she has called “big girl” roles like Elena in Rossini’s La Donna del Lago and Donizetti’s Mary Stuart.

For a soprano like Ms. Opolais, a decade younger, the “big girl” thing is more easily taken care of. She has already made splashes in Europe as Rusalka, Jenufa, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, and the Met has big plans for her in coming seasons.

Their two operas defined a month of unusual heroines at the Met. Out were the pitiable, frequently tubercular girls like Violetta, Lucia, Aida and Mimi. Instead of those pathetic sufferers, Met audiences have gotten Cassandra and Dido in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, as well as Mary Stuart and La Rondine’s Magda. These women are hardly exempt from heartbreak and death, but they have a degree of power and agency unusual in opera. They are vehicles for performers who can show how to live, not just how to die.

Maria Stuarda is a grand melodrama—its noble final scene is capped with a climb up to the scaffold. Ms. DiDonato sang the title role with thoughtfulness, polish and a range of colors, and she hit her acting marks diligently.

Yet at the Met, the lighter La Rondine was the work that revealed the true diva.

La Rondine, which began as a light Viennese operetta before being transformed into an Italian tearjerker, is not a natural diva vehicle, with its wispy emotions and clunky plot. The story of a kept woman who wants to escape and marry a pleasant young man, it is like La Traviata with less tragedy. (The lovers are eventually, poignantly separated, but not by death.)

Yet despite the work’s slightness, Ms. Opolais seemed to live within it, growing in stature as the evening went on and radiating the kind of aura—one that demands that you watch her, and sympathize with her—that defines a star.

That aura, when you have it, finds its way into the most seemingly insignificant details. The third act of La Rondine opens happily, with the lovers ensconced in a glamorous hotel on the French Riviera. Magda is pouring them some tea. It is a throwaway gesture, but the way Ms. Opolais raised the teapot as she poured it somehow captured, in just a second or two, the joy and pleasure of their new life.

Her performance was full of such telling moments set within a portrayal that was physically free and vocally strong. Ms. Opolais didn’t begin well: she was disturbingly inaudible at the beginning, though the entire cast struggled against Ezio Frigerio’s open-ceilinged set, which let voices vanish up into the flies.

Magda’s most famous aria comes right at the beginning, and Ms. Opolais got through it without tremendous distinction. But little by little, her voice seemed to get bigger and her acting looser. Her instrument is not quite plush, but lithe and precise. It penetrates.

She was joined by a cast, conducted by Ion Marin, not quite on her level. The premiere was an off night for Giuseppe Filianoti, who sounded at home stylistically but tight at the top of his range. Marius Brenciu’s tenor was smaller but more secure as Prunier; as his lover (and Magda’s maid) Lisette, Anna Christy’s soprano was smaller still.

It was Ms. Opolais’s evening. At the end of the opera, having left her lover, she is bathed in a spotlight, arms outstretched and face stricken. There is little room for extremity in this opera, which remains stubbornly tasteful and small in scope, but Ms. Opolais found it. Like any good operatic performance, she had become specific and mythical: the very embodiment of isolation and pain. She is a performer with a tremendous future ahead of her; New York will be lucky to have her.

The city has long been lucky to have Ms. DiDonato, an artist whose interests stretch from Baroque to contemporary opera and whose enthusiasm, onstage and off, is infectious. There is no major singer in the world today who is sweeter and more lovable.

If her Maria Stuarda ended up being affecting but not quite awe-inspiring, it may have been because of that sweetness. Donizetti’s depiction of Mary, Queen of Scots, is deeply sympathetic, but it is larger than life, an epic portrayal of a complicated woman who rages against her confinement before arriving at a transcendent acceptance.

Ms. DiDonato sang wonderfully, particularly in the soft prayers of the last act, but try as she might, she cannot will herself to be larger than life. There is always an aspect of calculation in her diva act. She hits all her marks, and it is clear that she knows what she is supposed to do. But there is a nagging sense of lack, of a performer who is game for anything but can’t quite make melodrama seem her natural habitat.

The classic “big girl” moment in Maria Stuarda comes in the finale of the first act, when Mary and Queen Elizabeth, who has imprisoned her, face off in a confrontation that is completely fictional and utterly irresistible. Mary hurls notes like cannonballs. She flings curses.

Here Ms. DiDonato, joined by the campily limping Elizabeth of Elza van den Heever, was admirable but not quite iconic, not quite insane. Joyce DiDonato does noble. She does plucky. She does not do insane.

And what is the difference between a great singer and a great diva? That.

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One Direction. (Getty Images)

The sound of 15,000 girls screaming at the top of their lungs was not what I thought it would be.

I had imagined it to be harsh and piercing, with the integrity of each individual scream maintained, like 15,000 stabbing stilettos. But it turns out there is no escaping fluid dynamics: 15,000 girls screaming turns out to be less a sound than a sensation, a molten force that surges forward in waves.

When I went to see the English boy band One Direction at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 3, I had never before attended a teenybopper-type concert. I’ve been to a good number of Bruce Springsteen shows, many in stadium venues far larger than the Garden, and people shout at those, too. They sing along to “Badlands” and “Born to Run” and call out “Bruce,” elongating the vowel to what sounds, amusingly, like a long, low “boo.”

But I had never in my life heard or felt anything like the scream that greeted the dimming of the house lights a few weeks ago. I glanced to my left and locked tired, terrified eyes with the mother standing next to me. I thought I had made a friend. It turned out that her terror was a ruse; she knew all the words to every one of One Direction’s songs.

It has been a tough, exhausting fall for New York City—really the whole tristate area. Sandy took a lot out of us. But if the girls at the One Direction show were tired, they sure didn’t sound it. After the show, I left Madison Square Garden feeling strangely elated. As scalding as the flood of screams was, there was something obscurely inspiring, even reviving, about it.

The problem, though, was that the audience seemed considerably more excited about the concert than the band did. The five members of One Direction, which has had two No. 1
albums in the United States in the past nine months, don’t “play it cool.” They smile and express in long, heartfelt monologues their awe at being onstage at the Garden—“this is the best night of my life” was a sentiment heard more than once from the stage—and how much they owe to the fans that put them there. They wear their eagerness and enthusiasm on their sleeves, but there’s something unpersuasive at their core.

What is the experience of a One Direction concert like? Their stage show, at least at this point, is more streamlined than the classic Backstreet Boys or ’N Sync production, with its mechanical arms and flying effects. Circa 2012 it is the video graphics that take center stage, with an unparalleled level of sophistication and detail. Laser beams sweep and bursts of steam shoot up from the floor as One Direction literally skips around the stage.

It turns out that skipping and walking just about sum up what the five boys, who are all between 18 and 20, are physically capable of doing. They can’t dance—not a single step. They can’t even shuffle rhythmically from foot to foot. Looking back at videos from the HBO special made during ’N Sync’s No Strings Attached tour in 2000, it isn’t that those guys are forbidding or larger than life. They smile, they joke, they talk about how much the crowd’s support means to them. But they perform with exuberant precision. Shaggy and good-natured, One Direction doesn’t.

At one point in the concert, the band covered the 2000 Wheatus single “Teenage Dirtbag,” best known for its appearance in the Jason Biggs movie Loser (the song seemed like a mystifyingly random choice until I discovered that it had been, back in the day, a far bigger hit in the U.K. than here).

This, someone decided, would be a dance moment. Harry, the mop-haired, kind of fetal-faced one whom you could make a case for as the “leader” of the group, was singing the opening verse while three of the other boys took a stab at dancing on the back risers. Their choreography seemed to consist of rhythmic squats performed while vibrating their arms in front of them. Niall (the boyish one with braces) did it halfheartedly, while glancing at Liam (the dull-eyed sexy one) as if to say, “What the fuck are we doing?”

Zayn, to his credit, was having none of it. In his reticence there was, if you thought long enough about it, a glimmer of his onetime refusal to dance—due, he said, to lack of confidence, but probably more a result of his reluctance to make a fool of himself—when he was a contestant in 2010 on the British version of The X Factor, the show on which the boys were separately discovered and ingeniously combined.

It is fascinating when a boy in a boy band does not do what he has been told, and in that regard Zayn Malik is a fascinating character. Half Pakistani, he is the hot one, and the only gesture toward diversity in what is otherwise a lily-white band. He would—or will—be the breakout star, the one with a solo career.

He is also the only one capable of doing things with his voice that go beyond an above-average high-school musical theater performance. Zayn gets the soulful-ish, croony moments that Justin Timberlake got to sing for ’N Sync—like “I don’t wanna be your fool in this game for two” in “Bye Bye Bye”—and he handles them nicely.

Because that is another thing: One Direction can sing, but not with any virtuosity or energy. At best they get through it and hit their marks (most of the time: Niall, who pretends to play the guitar, is particularly weak, and Louis, the classically handsome one, is little better). While the concert was, to all appearances, remarkably free of lip-synching and back tracks, the exposed singing was not inept but just … fine.

At one point toward the end of the show, the boys took a break and answered questions that popped up on the video screen from girls who had tweeted them. These were softballs—things like “Which of you can jump the highest?”—and the boys smiled through them, displaying surprisingly little of the basic star qualities, charisma and flair. There’s something disconcertingly sexless about the band. “The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed” goes their hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” a sentiment more stylist-to-client than stud-to-lady. At the Garden there were no crotch grabs, no big-lipped air kisses into the audience. One girl’s question went something like, “If you were an animal, what would your mating call be?” This type of query and others like it seemed to beg for PG-13 answers, but the ones they got were resolutely, blandly G.

There is something about One Direction that doesn’t quite have traction, and despite their big album sales and a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden (not to mention a swiftly sold-out tour next year), their songs have not had the consistently shining performance on radio that would prove their long-term viability.

One Direction is certainly not the first band to attract a lot of attention and the adoration of young women without being brilliantly dynamic, but there was something disturbing in how workaday their talents were; the preteen girls a few rows in front of me were better dancers. I felt carried on that wave of screaming to a moment in culture sometime in the near future, when what happens onstage at a concert will be the same as what happens in the crowd: varying degrees of amateurism.

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Sondra Radvanovsky in 'Un Ballo in Maschera.' (Courtesy Met Opera)

“They’re straying into different dramatic areas,” the English mezzo-soprano Felicity Palmer told me recently of today’s Metropolitan Opera. “But I wonder if they’re ready for David.” I was speaking with Ms. Palmer for a profile of director David Alden, and her concern made perfect sense in the lead-up to his Met debut last week, directing a new production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. For a long time, he was the kind of director who simply didn’t work at the Met.

Along with his twin brother, Christopher, and others of their generation, Mr. Alden, now 63, shook the world of opera in the 1980s. Beginning their careers at a time when the art form, particularly in America, sagged under the weight of massive, elaborate sets, the Aldens and their ilk pared down the visual component in visceral, politically charged productions of the classics. David in particular became known for ferociously violent, vivid shows.

His dreamy, visually striking version of Ballo for the English National Opera in London in 1989 was one of the most important productions of the past few decades, ushering in a new, more open-minded era in the traditionally staid English opera scene. He has remained a vital, busy artist, and Peter Gelb’s Met, seeking to make up for lost time, decided that it was ready for him. Was it?

Yes, but sadly, who cares? Despite eliciting some boos at Mr. Alden’s curtain call, the production, which premiered on Thursday in front of a drearily sedate crowd, was strangely tame. Unlike his pathbreaking English National Opera Ballo, Mr. Alden’s Met version, conducted by Fabio Luisi, cannot be said to have ushered in much of anything. There were glimmers of inspiration and interest throughout, but nothing that caught fire during an uneasily chilly evening.

Censored in the mid 19th century, when it was new, for its inflammatory depiction of a regicide, Ballo is the story of a Swedish king in love with the wife of his closest friend. It is characteristically Verdian in the way it crashes together the personal and the political, but the mixture is stranger and more volatile than in most of the composer’s works.

The opera combines elements of farce, melodrama and surreal, narcissistic fantasy, and Mr. Alden includes hints of all three. He seems to have imagined much of the piece as taking place within King Gustavo’s mind—a perfectly good idea—but the action was never quite intense or weird enough to support that concept, and the mood never as clearly defined or compelling as the sharp, vivid lighting.

Mr. Alden has also suggested that the relationship between Gustavo and his friend, Renato, is the opera’s true love story, rather than Gustavo’s illicit passion for Renato’s wife, Amelia. That’s also a legitimate idea, but the lack of tension—or any connection at all, really—between Marcelo Álvarez’s Gustavo and Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s Renato made that a dead end.

Mr. Hvorostovsky’s smoky and insinuating voice is theoretically well-suited to Mr. Alden’s moody, ominous approach, which makes it especially unfortunate that he was such a bland, generic presence. Mr. Álvarez, and Sondra Radvanovsky as Amelia, were more successful: both in good, ardent voice and Mr. Álvarez as game to act as he’s ever been at the Met. Yet the ensemble never gelled or felt connected to an overarching vision.

Even the visual element lacked Mr. Alden’s characteristic flair. The walls come in and out, and the ceiling—a gigantic painting of Icarus falling from the sky—pivots up and down, but the effect is curiously weary. The production gives the general impression of a brainstorming session, a mess of ideas that haven’t had the chance to settle.

It is difficult to precisely place the blame for a disappointing production, but it is reasonable to assume that the problem of this Ballo goes beyond just this show. If someone as experienced and responsible as David Alden can’t produce something exciting or interesting, there is reason to question whether exciting or interesting is consistently possible at today’s Met.

Some shows work, and some don’t—that’s the nature of the business—but at this point in Peter Gelb’s tenure as general director, which began in 2006, one particular trend has become obvious. The successful productions of the Gelb regime have disproportionately been ones that have been created elsewhere and eventually transferred to the Met, including Anthony Minghella’s Madama Butterfly, Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott’s Satyagraha and Patrice Chéreau’s From the House of the Dead.

Willy Decker’s spare, focused La Traviata, the closest correlate to Mr. Alden’s take on Ballo,another Verdi classic, was made into a popular DVD after its debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, five years before landing in New York. All of these shows were created under conditions of far greater time and focus than those afforded by the Met’s frenetic sprints of rehearsals. They could then be revived in New York and refitted for the new space and new casts: a demanding process, but one that is less labor- and time-intensive than creating something from scratch.

Especially when compared with those critical and popular hits, the Met’s homegrown productions have been inoffensive at best and disastrous at worst, from Bartlett Sher’s variously incoherent, twee efforts to Mary Zimmerman’s condescending takes on bel canto gems to Robert Lepage’s brainless Ring cycle to serviceable but generic productions of standards like Carmen and Il Trovatore. Add to this list Mr. Alden’s thoughtful but unfocused and clearly harried Ballo.

The Met today is just not a place where real theater artists can make stimulating work. Part of the trouble is inertia: the difficulty of creating exciting productions in a place that largely ignored the theatrical element of opera for the better part of a century.

Another, related issue is a jam-packed schedule—a long, relentless season of multiple operas per week, nearly 30 in total—that forces the company to be more a factory, endlessly churning out product, than a theater. The company also depends for ticket sales on star singers who may understand that they have to be adept and “theatrical” on stage to survive in opera today but who are not, at the end of the day, comfortable working with directors who have truly provocative or difficult ideas.

These historical and logistical limitations will be tested in coming years as darlings of the international avant-garde like Dmitri Tcherniakov and, reportedly, Martin Kušej make their way to the company. They are used to many weeks of work with singing actors well versed in their experimental styles, and they are also used to working at companies with lower-volume seasons than the Met.

Mr. Gelb should be commended for understanding that good directors are integral to good opera. But generous gestation periods should not be viewed as dispensable luxuries. You can’t just throw talented artists into the machine that is the Met and expect them to create something memorable; you have to give them the support that great art requires.

It is unlikely that that kind of support will be on offer without a drastic overhaul of the Met’s season, specifically a substantial reduction in its length and the number of productions that comprise it. The only surefire way for the Met to change is if it does less but does it better. That may not be feasible, at least not right away, but it is necessary if an artist like David Alden is going to work at the company and make us glad he did.

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'The Tempest.' (Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

Just nine months after finishing up his woeful production of Wagner’s Ring cycleat the Metropolitan Opera, the director Robert Lepage has done an about-face. He has abandoned the technical wizardry of the Ring—the 3-D video projections, the enormous rotating set—and pared back his style.

For the Met premiere of Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera The Tempest on Tuesday evening, Mr. Lepage used one of the oldest tricks in the book: a theater—Milan’s great opera house, the Teatro alla Scala, to be precise—within the theater. Old-fashioned wheels turn, and characters charmingly vanish into and emerge from the prompter’s box. Mr. Lepage has put aside the forward-thinking ambitions of his Ring for the kind of hoary, aggressively adorable entertainment that is the specialty of another favored Met director, Bartlett Sher.

Like Mr. Sher’s bland version of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, which opened the company’s season last month, Mr. Lepage’s Tempest looks like something that has been exhumed from a dusty storage vault. But this new production is the more mystifying of the two: why has the Met chosen to do a contemporary opera, one with a spiky, glinting score, in such a stale, static, cheesy-looking way?

The fault is not entirely Mr. Lepage’s. The opera, which has been extravagantly praised since its premiere eight years ago, is deeply flawed as theater, with its tantalizing sound world rarely coming into dramatic focus.

The music is often sheerly beautiful. “Shimmering” is a word that is mentioned in almost every prose account of the work, and it does indeed seem to shimmer. There are long passages—Caliban’s soaring Act II aria, “Friends don’t fear,” is the best of many—in which the sound seems to hover weightlessly in the air. The score manages the nearly impossible task of our postmodern era: being eclectic without feeling inorganic or inauthentic. It runs the gamut from the jazzy rhythms of the very beginning to a Baroque-inspired quintet near the end, and it never sounds like pastiche. It all sounds like Adès.

But after the rhythmic peppiness of that opening, the plot gets underway with a long, sluggish dose of exposition, when Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, slouch onstage to retell the story of his exile from the dukedom of Milan and their difficult journey to the magic island he now rules. Things never really get going from there. Mr. Adès’s music is far more adept at creating an ethereal, kaleidoscopic mood than at shaping characters or drama.

Part of the problem is Meredith Oakes’s libretto, which shows admirable willingness to mess with Shakespeare but doesn’t go far enough. The Met has stranded us once more in doggerel land, the same place we ended up in Jeremy Sams’s stomach-turningly cutesy libretto for last year’s Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island.

So there are ineptly rhyming couplets like “Fearful story/I’m so sorry,” and an antiqued, ersatz mood that feels out of step with the score. Mr. Adès’s work has classical inspirations and aspirations, but it is of our time, seething and strange. It deserves less polite, less stagnant words.

And though it is good and necessary that the collaborators reshaped the play, it seems strange that one of the elements excised in the transition is the threatening nature of Caliban’s character, and the aggression with which Prospero has enslaved him and Ariel. These are racial politics seen through a poignant, personal lens, and an aspect of the drama that would have spoken to us. Instead this Caliban is a dull, defanged monster, his half-hearted complaints those of a spurned lover (he lusts after Miranda) rather than those of an oppressed, infuriated minority.

Indeed, all of the characters’ interactions lack weight and urgency. In the opera, when Miranda decides to marry Ferdinand against her father’s wishes, it is meant to be an act as solemn and painful as Brünnhilde’s rebellion against Wotan. But in the Ring Wagner crafts the father-daughter relationship so carefully and richly that its dissolution is heartbreaking. It is hard to believe in Mr. Adès’s characters with anything approaching the same fervor.

With few philosophical or personal stakes, the music, as good as much of it is, remains essentially decorative. And I kept thinking that the score might have been better served—lighter and, yes, more shimmering—with a conductor other than the composer. Things frequently felt overplayed, italicized, more drawn out than transparent.

The cast was committed to parts that are often unrewarding. Prospero is onstage much of the opera, but mostly just to stand around and look moody and forceful. Simon Keenlyside, who originated the role in 2004, is ready enough to do this, and he is an intelligent singer, but his voice these days is less commanding than his physique and manner.

Alek Shrader and, especially, Isabel Leonard sing tenderly as Ferdinand and Miranda. Audrey Luna diligently handles Ariel’s stratospheric wails, closing the opera with an otherworldly echo, and Alan Oke sings Caliban with naturalness and sincerity, less impassioned than Ian Bostridge on the recording but more affectingly subtle.

But many of the distinguished, mostly young artists—Iestyn Davies, Toby Spence, Christopher Feigum, Kevin Burdette, William Burden—are given precious little to do. The would-be comic relief, from Mr. Burdette’s Stefano and Mr. Davies’s Trinculo, is painfully unfunny. By the time the great acts of forgiveness and redemption arrive near the end, it is simply hard to care about these people. For all its eagerness to distinguish itself from Shakespeare, the operatic Tempest replaces the play’s deeply felt emotions and deeply held ideas with wan sketches.

Davies as Trinculo, Burdette as Stefano, and Oke as Caliban. (Courtesy Ken Howard/Met Opera)

Perhaps sensing the limitations of the work, Mr. Lepage has fitted it with a Big Idea. After doing a Ring that was stubbornly anti-concept, the director has done a Tempest that is only concept. It wasn’t a problem, in theory, to situate The Tempest at La Scala. After all, the island in the play and opera ends up being a kind of colony of Milan, somewhere that is both Milan and not, a place where its citizens go to be subtly but significantly different than themselves. One of the city’s great theaters is a natural parallel.

Yet Mr. Lepage makes the classic concept-production blunder: the action feels like it could just as easily be taking place anywhere and just happens to be on this particular set. I wish, in a way, that he had gone further, and done something closer to Mary Zimmerman’s flawed yet intriguing 2009 Met production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula, which was set among a company of singers putting on La Sonnambula. If you think The Tempest is about theater, make it about theater. If you think Prospero is a director, make him a director. Instead Mr. Lepage has given us a standard production of The Tempest, but has set it, rather awkwardly and unattractively, inside La Scala.

Near the end of the show, when a ship returns to bring everyone back to Italy, sailors come out and begin pulling at the backstage ropes, which we suddenly realize are analogues of the ropes of the ship. The metaphorical and “real” worlds mingle movingly. But such moments occur all too rarely. Given a far more problematic work than Wagner’s Ring, Mr. Lepage has responded with an approach that looks utterly different but is really just more of the same: a flat, largely emotion-free production that sometimes impresses but never moves.

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The cast of 'L’Elisir d’Amore.' (Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

Bartlett Sher’s new production of Donizetti’s classic comedy L’Elisir d’Amore, which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season last week with a cast led by Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani, is set in an idyllic Italian village in the first half of the 19th century.

It’s an image we’re all too familiar with—the small-town Italy of lusty girls, open-shirted men and sidewalk cafes, the Italy of travel posters and pasta sauce commercials. But odd, puzzling touches lurk if you care—or are bored enough by the onstage proceedings—to notice them.

Hazy blue forms loom in the background, off to one side of the stage. They look a bit like missile silos. This is 2012, after all, I thought as I pondered these: a period of distinctly postmodern opera direction. Perhaps Mr. Sher, who has directed three other operas at the Met in recent years, intended to subtly float a hint of the perils of nuclear proliferation, a dark underbelly to the opera’s lightness.

Or maybe the forms were intended to be echoes of the fountain-like emerald city of Oz, a reminder that all of this—the plot, theater, life itself—is a fantasy.

This is all ridiculous, of course. The silos are most plausibly there because the show’s set designer needed some innocuous shapes to fill out the immense verticality of the Met’s stage. I was only letting my pseudo-intellectual flights of fancy soar free because Mr. Sher has done the same.

“Elisir is almost two operas at once,” he says in an interview in the program. “It’s a great entertainment and an opera with something else happening underneath it. And that’s the Risorgimento, the development of Italian independence.”

Somewhere in this dull, innocuous staging, in other words, beats the bloody heart of a revolutionary. Mr. Sher claims that at the opera’s premiere in Milan in 1832, the audience would have viewed Adina, Nemorino and the villagers as the restive Italians and Belcore, the bumptious sergeant who comes to town, as the Austrians who still ruled Italy at the time.

“Nothing can ever be genuinely funny without pain, anxiety,” Mr. Sher says in the program. “They’re the fuel of comedy. The circumstances and stakes have to be extremely high.”

That is indisputably true, and I have no problem, in theory, with a Risorgimento-flavored Elisir, or one shot through with strands of darkness. (A recent, excellent production in Munich gave the opera a surreal, post-apocalyptic, steampunk-ish setting.)

The trouble is not Mr. Sher’s concept but the fact that so little of it finds its way onto the stage. The costumes may well be accurate to the period, but the production is generic—no pain or anxiety to speak of. With its painted flats and cutout trees, it looks as antiquated and creaky as the candy-colored 1991 version it replaces. Elisir is a sturdily, spectacularly entertaining work, but its tonal balance is delicate: both slapstick and subtle. Mr. Sher’s production isn’t consistently or satisfyingly either one.

And there are basic problems with the Risorgimento conceit. Mr. Sher intermittently has the baritone Mariusz Kwiecien play Belcore and his soldiers as bullies, with dollops of physical aggression. (Austria! Get it?) But if the sergeant is a symbol of hateful foreign oppression, then why does the town hand him Giannetta, one of its beloved peasant girls, as a going-away present? More to the point, if Belcore is so unpleasant from the get-go, then why is the smart, beautiful Adina drawn to him? It seems an awful lot of trouble for her to be on the verge of marrying such an off-putting prospect merely to prove something to the hapless Nemorino.

“I think Adina is a bit of a tomboy,” Mr. Sher explains in that program interview. But plopping a top hat on Ms. Netrebko does not a tomboy make, nor does it elucidate the social distinctions—the small but telling social details—that make the opera’s world so engaging and rich. It’s just another idea that makes Mr. Sher sound as though he’s done his homework.

We’ve been here before. In 2009, Mr. Sher tried to justify his murky Met production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann with a seemingly random matrix of references that ranged from the outsider anxiety of 19th-century Jews in France to Kafka and Fellini. But unless some bowler hats and umbrellas emblazoned with huge eyeballs qualified, there was no sign of any of those things in the actual production. Mr. Sher paid lip service to psychological nuance but, as in Elisir, there was not much of it on offer.

And in Rossini’s Le Comte Ory last year, he had an opportunity to direct a work that, even more than Elisir, is both bubbly and disturbing, setting a gender-bending love farce atop a society exhausted from years of war. Yet Mr. Sher’s production was crass and glib, ignorant of the high “circumstances and stakes” that he now insists are essential to comedy.

This Elisir works in those moments when it is so conventional that the opera itself shines through, or because of a series of entertaining performances and Maurizio Benini’s conducting, which was more focused than much of his past work at the Met.

Ms. Netrebko sang with luster, and has the ability to levitate her big, ever-darkening voice for coloratura ornaments. She acted with characteristic gusto, adding in little bits—a jump from a table, a couple of twirls—that are meant to project enthusiasm.

Then there are mystifying moments: one wonders why, nearly at the end of a plot during which she has supposedly matured and deepened, she chose to convey a clownish caricature of sadness during the duet with Dulcamara. Like any great opera singer, though, she acted with her voice, a mixture of acute peppiness and floating loveliness.

Mr. Polenzani’s muted, bashful Nemorino was far preferable to the irritating, self-regarding antics of Juan Diego Flórez, who played the role at the Met this spring. But while his singing was clean, responsible, and often very pretty, neither his sound nor his acting made you sit up and take notice. He was almost always correct, almost never exciting.

At least you could hear him clearly, which is more than can be said for the stylish but underpowered Mr. Kwiecien, who tended to push his voice to make it heard. The bass Ambrogio Maestri brought care to Dulcamara’s fast-moving patter.

Mr. Sher is the appropriate mascot for a company that tends to flail between high-minded artistry and a silly attempt at populism, even if Robert Lepage, who directed the extravagantly expensive, woefully empty-headed production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, has gotten the lion’s share of attention as the symbol of Peter Gelb’s Met. Despite the well-deserved drubbing he got for the Ring, Mr. Lepage has been re-engaged for Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, the first New York performance of the brilliantly creative 2004 opera. It opens on Oct. 23, perhaps the highlight of the Met’s mostly bland fall, which is dotted with a just a few interesting revivals—an unexpectedly good Il Trovatore, a highly promising La Clemenza di Tito—and new productions.

A couple of weeks after the premiere of The Tempest, on Nov. 8, David Alden makes his company debut directing Verdi’s seething tale of personal and political intrigue, Un Ballo in Maschera. Mr. Alden is that great rarity at Mr. Gelb’s Met: an experienced opera director. He is known for intriguing, well-considered concepts and a talent for eliciting good acting from generally uninspiring singers, which will come in handy with the tenor Marcelo Álvarez.

All in all, that Ballo may well prove a tonic to the Met’s featured productions over the past few years. While Mr. Lepage’s Ring was proudly brainless, Mr. Sher goes a step further, offering the illusion of cerebral activity without the trouble of actual thoughtfulness. Like so many of the Met’s artistic decisions, his ideas sound great on paper, but just don’t play.

The program says it best: “What, you might ask, does the 19th-century Italian struggle against Austrian domination have to do with the story of a simple peasant who thinks a magical elixir will win him the love of his life?”

What, indeed.

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Peter Gelb. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

By the third week in May, the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season had been over for a week or so. Not that an opera company’s summer is really a break. Most of July is spent planning, and by August preparations are underway in earnest for the start of the season in September. The final week or so of May, however, is a reliable respite. The phones slow down; staff members usually get away for a few days.

But the tiny, gossipy opera world started from its slumber on May 21, when Daniel J. Wakin reported on The New York Times’ website that Opera News, the magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild (the nonprofit foundation that promotes opera and gives grants to the Met), would no longer be publishing reviews of Met productions. The decision had been made by Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who had been upset by two recent articles in the glossy: a scathing review of the new production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and an essay by one of the magazine’s editors that criticized the Met’s artistic direction more broadly.

In journalism, three’s a trend, and this was the third instance of Mr. Gelb’s high-handed efforts to suppress critical outlets. Last August, the Met asked a blogger to stop publishing his listing of future Met seasons—he did—and last month Mr. Gelb personally asked the radio station WQXR to remove a blog post that ragged on him. The station complied.

So Mr. Wakin’s web post was more than just a news article; it was a genuine trend piece, and since The Times covers high culture and culture in New York aggressively, it ended up on the front page of the paper the following day. This found it a far wider readership than the usual opera story; friends of mine who couldn’t care less about opera were suddenly asking me about Opera News. The response was an immediate onslaught. Alex Ross, on The New Yorker’s blog, wrote that “the episode only intensified questions about Gelb’s fitness to lead the institution.” On the Washington Post’s blog, Anne Midgette was more blunt: “the takeaway now seems to me to be that Gelb is losing his mind.”

Even if he isn’t mentally ill, it seems that Mr. Gelb, like the rest of his staff, could use a vacation. It was a dispiriting season for New York’s opera critics, and doubtless a draining one for him. Lacking any justification at all to call Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Ring cycle a success, the Met is currently trying to manufacture an aura of “controversy” around it, but that’s a little like saying that there’s “controversy” among scientists about climate change.

What has been lost in the shuffle of the Met’s recent P.R. debacle is the fate of its music director, James Levine, whose persistent ailments have caused him to cancel all his performances next season. The word is that he intends eventually to return, but who knows?

I have been thinking a lot about Mr. Levine lately, and not just because the increasingly rudderless Met is in need of someone to handle its artistic direction. I’ve been thinking more about his style. Even if Mr. Levine’s musical-historical eminence is taken for granted in New York more than it should be, his conducting was always acknowledged as having weight. It had grandeur and size. (The downside of this is that it was sometimes, particularly in Wagner, eye-rollingly slow.)

The trend lately has been for something quite different. Few had kind words for the Ring production, but many critics did praise the conducting of Fabio Luisi, the Met’s principal conductor and, some say, music director in waiting. In many cases this functioned as a rhetorical strategy—a way of conspicuously not disliking everything, thereby making the most pungent criticisms count—but some writers did seem to respond to Mr. Luisi, who is also the conductor of the Vienna Symphony.

In Wagner, Mr. Luisi has said that he is all about transparency, lightness, subtlety: a corrective to sludgy Ring performances. But that sludginess is a straw man, and conductors have been advocating for “lighter,” more detailed versions of the Ring for decades now. When it comes to Mr. Luisi, you’re usually more aware of what’s missing than what’s been put in its place. The conductor’s touch often felt less light than affectless; maybe it was transparent, but the result was that you saw, and heard, very little. The Ring cycle closes with an apocalypse, the collapse of the gods’ regime, and Wagner’s arching theme of redemption through love. In Mr. Luisi’s rendition, the music might have been depicting a pleasant day in the park. Heaviness is not always the enemy when it’s profundity you’re going for.

This heaviness-versus-lightness debate flared up again on May 24 at a concert performance of Strauss’s Salome at Carnegie Hall featuring the mighty Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of its mercurial music director, Franz Welser-Möst. (Mr. Welser-Möst, like Mr. Luisi, also has an Austrian appointment; he leads the Vienna State Opera.)

His conception of Salome—which is often rendered as a bludgeon of sound—was streamlined, lyrical, sometimes oddly aloof. There were advantages to this approach: The early scenes were eerily offhand, making the eventual catastrophe even more powerful. The “Dance of the Seven Veils” began liltingly. Yet unlike Mr. Luisi’s Ring, Mr. Welser-Möst’s Salome rose to its climaxes. The unleashing of the seventh veil had a seventh-seal fury, and Mr. Welser-Möst had the great dramatic soprano Nina Stemme on his side for the final scene.

Appearing in evening wear, her Salome was vaguer than it might be in a staged production, and she made no effort, either in voice or interpretation, toward demonstrating that the character is a teenager. This was a pure-sound kind of evening, and Ms. Stemme obliged with volume and warmth. In the final scene, she astonished a New York audience who has this spring been given Natalie Dessay, Deborah Voigt (Mr. Luisi’s Brunnhilde) and Karita Mattila—redoubtable divas all, but none currently capable of anything approaching Ms. Stemme’s rich flood of tone.

Some critics found Mr. Welser-Möst’s conducting overly slight. Unlike Mr. Luisi’s Ring, though, its lightness revealed an erotic Orientalist fantasia—not the scherzo Strauss said he wanted, but a legitimate alternative, as self-conscious and detached as Salome herself.

Perhaps I had been readied for a lighter Salome by seeing Werner Schroeter’s strange, mesmerizing 1971 film version of the Oscar Wilde play upon which the opera is based at the Museum of Modern Art the day before. Set on a ruin in Lebanon, Schroeter’s film is more a whisper than a scream. The action takes on a queasy aspect when the main characters are actually adolescents: Salome’s petulance and Jokanaan’s self-righteousness finally seem crushingly equivalent.

The mood has the precision and wrongness of a dream; music from the opera plays at incorrect moments. There is a sense throughout of something very strange and tense, which should be the fundamental quality of Salome and was present throughout the Cleveland ensemble’s idiosyncratic, riveting performance.

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'Cosi Fan Tutte' at City Opera. (Courtesy City Opera)

The role of the “other” opera companies in New York is to serve as alternatives to the Metropolitan Opera. It’s that simple.

It has been this way since the turn of the 20th century, when Oscar Hammerstein’s upstart Manhattan Opera House countered the Met’s stagnant repertory with contemporary opera and the American premieres of works like Pelleas et Melisande, Elektra and Salome. New York City Opera, in its prime, offered a similar package: the operas, directors and young, attractive singers that the Met wouldn’t touch.

Fast-forward a few decades, and the situation has reversed. The Met is now its own alternative, with an established and growing commitment to contemporary work and a variety of directorial approaches on display. No longer, at least in theory, is it all Zeffirelli-style naturalism, all the time.

City Opera, still reeling from financial troubles, seems to have ceded the field almost entirely. What was most depressing about the La Traviata that opened its abbreviated 2012 season last month wasn’t the inanity of the powdered-wig-realism production, though opera rarely feels so irrelevant and pointless, with a tepid first act that felt like a garden party rather than a prostitute’s late-night blowout. No, the most depressing thing was that it opened just two months before the Met’s revival of the thoughtful, contemporary, radically spare Willy Decker production that pointed in a new direction for the company’s treatment of the standard repertory when it premiered in 2010.

Not only did City Opera fail to live up to its own standard—Frank Corsaro’s production for the company all the way back in the 1960s treated the opera with painstaking, dramatically vibrant seriousness—but it was beaten soundly by the Met. That is something that the “other” opera companies simply cannot afford.

So it came as a saving grace when Christopher Alden’s production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte for City Opera played at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College last week. Back in 2009, when Mr. Alden’s eerie, elegant production of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place opened, a year after his eerie, elegant Don Giovanni, I wrote in this paper: “If City Opera gives us an Alden production a year in perpetuity (which seems to be the plan), it’ll be an extraordinary gift to our cultural life.”

It now seems that the one-Alden-a-year allotment is to be City Opera’s only gift to our cultural life. Its Cosi is excellent—strange and bracing—and unlike La Traviata, its Met counterpart is a wanly picturesque dud. There is finally something worth celebrating at City Opera.

The production takes place in a public park over the course of a single night, partly idyllic and partly ominous, half Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and half Central Park Jogger. The design is spare. There is a life-size image of a small meadow that serves as a backdrop and a large bench that shifts position as the scenes progress, and that’s about it.

Mr. Alden seems to have been inspired by his own haunting production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which played in London last summer. Don Alfonso, the older gentleman who convinces two young friends to test their fiancées’ fidelity by disguising themselves and attempting to woo each other’s women, has become a dandified Oberon, administering an ambiguous potion to the four lovers. This may be a metaphor for hormones, the chemicals that deliver us from innocence to experience. Whatever it is, it makes them fall asleep, and when they awaken, the rest of the first act takes on a kind of drugged stylization. Alfonso (the forcefully restrained Rodney Gilfry) and Despina (the lively Marie Lenormand) separate the lovers as if separating stuck-together magnets, and everyone moves in a trancelike slow motion.

The characters are isolated in a world that blends fantasy and reality. For “Come scoglio,” the other characters abruptly leave as Fiordiligi (the angular, agile Sara Jakubiak) hikes up her skirt and covers her face with her hair, a madwoman-in-the-attic figure, and then reappear as she finishes.

Alfonso starts the second act, surreally, in a bear costume, with Despina as his trainer: power tamed. Similarly, the two male lovers are soon after given rabbit ears to wear, a conflicted symbol both of children’s costumes and, well, fucking like rabbits.

After the dazed first act, the second has a kind of jittery explosiveness as the lovers lash out at each other, brandishing rowboat oars and crumpling in corners after exhaustingly physical renditions of their arias. Dorabella’s “È amore un ladroncello” (“Love is a little thief”), usually a pleasant diversion, became in the hands of the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Holloway a desperate cry of frustration and misery.

The baritone Philip Cutlip and, especially, the passionate tenor Allan Clayton were fully committed presences. One of Mr. Alden’s most valuable gifts is his ability to win over his performers to his vision, and the result is a rare consistency of mood and approach; everyone always seems to be living in the same production.

My only significant problem came, as it did in Mr. Alden’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the final scene. His Dream—which was framed by a man on the eve of his wedding looking back on his fraught schoolboy days—ended with Puck, the younger version of the man, spitting out the famous “If we shadows have offended” speech with vicious anger. It struck me that the more effective ending would have had a spirit of resignation rather than fury. Yes, things can be awful, and yes, we grow up. But it happens, and life goes on.

Mr. Alden’s Cosi ends with similar bitterness: the four lovers sitting on the bench, all facing directly forward, fuming, passing a bottle of Champagne back and forth.

Mozart and Da Ponte leave the outcome up to the director. Do the original lovers reunite? Do the new couples marry instead? Does nothing at all happen? After a long series of revisionist productions of the opera, it is now standard to avoid a “happy” ending in which peace and order are restored, so there is nothing really new in Mr. Alden’s solution. Indeed, I wondered as I watched if the more harrowing Cosi production would end “happily,” with the original couples back together. That would be in keeping with the truly adult nature of the opera’s conclusion: people learn all the horrible things there are to know about each other, and they reconcile anyway. Life goes on.

To insist instead, as Mr. Alden does, on closing with a mood of adolescent peevishness is wrong, not because we deserve to leave the theater in a good humor, but because it would be more difficult and thought-provoking to choose the alternative. In the guise of increasing the opera’s complexity, Mr. Alden’s ending is a cop-out.

About the painfully scrappy, out-of-tune orchestra, conducted by the Baroque specialist Christian Curnyn, the less said the better. The seductively morose production would have benefited from atmospheric playing, but nevertheless it made its impact. Not every moment or idea is convincing, but Mr. Alden’s seriousness and inventiveness are engrossing.

Laurent Pelly, who directed the production of Massenet’s Manon that arrived at the Met on Monday, tends to confuse inventiveness and preciousness. His Manon, updated to the Belle Epoque 1880s, can be charming, but the cutesiness gets exhausting, with all the cheerfully out-of-scale sets and the choruses mugging and freezing in time with the music.

And he sometimes overplays his hand. It is mesmerizing when someone from the chorus—one of the crowd of anonymous, top-hat-wearing gentlemen who haunt the production—seems to guide a ballerina through her paces with his walking stick during the ballet in the Cours-la-Reine scene. In a few seconds you perceive all of the sexual tension and latent misogyny in the opera’s world; it’s fabulous. But it is much less mesmerizing, and much more ordinary, when the scene ends with a violent mass abduction of the ballerinas. It comes across, perversely, as more cutesiness.

The great soprano Anna Netrebko fully gets the doomed Manon’s mixture of girlishness and sensuality. (It would be fascinating to see what Mr. Alden would do with her and this opera.) Her voice is blooming recently; some moments in which she has trouble getting it fully aloft are more than compensated for by long passages of magnetic richness. And the tenor Piotr Beczala, as her tortured lover Des Grieux, is a singer of consummate classiness.

With a well-paced if not especially delicate orchestral performance led by Fabio Luisi, it was a lovely evening. But thanks to Mr. Pelly, it was also oddly harried and uncomfortably detached. City Opera wins the week.

editorial@observer.com

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. (Photo by Larry Fink)

“We really don’t want to be jerks,” Jamie Bernstein told The Observer recently. “Who wants to be a jerk?”

Ms. Bernstein was sitting at the dining room table of her Chelsea apartment, talking about the legacy of her father, Leonard Bernstein. It’s that legacy that she doesn’t want to be a jerk about.

Along with her sister and brother and the small staff and board of the Leonard Bernstein Office Inc., Ms. Bernstein is in charge of overseeing the future of Lenny. This intimate group is the gatekeeper for all things Bernstein, giving the final approval for new productions, adaptations and arrangements.

It was to this group that the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra appealed a couple of years ago. The ensemble was beginning to conceptualize an all-American concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite and Chris Thile’s Mandolin Concerto. (The concert takes place this Saturday at Carnegie Hall.) The consensus was that Bernstein would make a great complement, but he wrote next to nothing for chamber orchestra.

One of Orpheus’s artistic directors, the violinist Ronnie Bauch, had an idea. In the late 1970s Mr. Bauch had played in a performance of Bernstein’s savagely peppy 1952 one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, at the Whitney Museum. Why not create an orchestral suite out of the irresistibly tuneful work, as Bernstein himself had done with the dazzling “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story”?

Mr. Bauch approached Paul Chihara, a composer and experienced arranger who had worked with Orpheus before. Early in his career Mr. Chihara had also studied under Bernstein at the Tanglewood Festival, so he seemed like a natural fit to extract a suite out of Trouble in Tahiti.

“It’s never been one of my favorite theatrical works because the story is so depressing,” Mr. Chihara admitted when we spoke at the café at Riverside Church, where Orpheus was rehearsing. But he is devoted to the score, and teared up as he described a particularly emotional passage.

“You can’t touch Bernstein without the Bernstein Office,” he said. “That ain’t easy, and it took a long time. They didn’t respond. Orpheus wrote the letter, and for the longest time we didn’t hear. And I thought, ‘Oh, they’re looking me over.’”

Mr. Chihara had been introduced to Jamie Bernstein through the composer William Bolcom, and she was supportive of the idea, but others on the staff and board had initial reservations.

“There was some discussion about it, because not everybody was sure it was a great idea, or necessary,” Ms. Bernstein said. “You know, it’s not an automatic ‘yes’ that you would extract orchestral music from a piece that is so vocal. No one had heard of Paul Chihara and it all sounded kind of odd, but eventually everyone got used to the idea and found that he was a stand-up guy and knew what he was doing.”

The process of getting this kind of approval through artists’ estates trusts and the like has gotten renewed attention with the controversial new Broadway production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. The production overhauled the work, particularly its sound, in an attempt to make it work as musical theater rather than opera. (A musical, it goes without saying, can make a lot more money for an artist’s descendants than an opera can.)

Similar issues were raised by the recent Broadway revival of West Side Story, which translated some of the dialogue into Spanish. The approval for the production had to work its long, winding way not just through the Bernstein Office, but through all the other collaborators’ estates as well.

“I had my reservations here and there,” Jamie Bernstein said about the West Side revival. “But overall I thought they did a pretty good job. The good news is that it finally happened, and now it’s on tour.”

That points to perhaps the most pressing concern for an artist’s heirs: that works continue to remain in the public eye. West Side Story is done all the time in high schools, but major Broadway revivals—and the professional tours that follow—matter in keeping something culturally central. But what form should those revivals take? As with the Trouble in Tahiti suite, how much adaptation is too much adaptation? What exactly is the “legacy” that an artist’s heirs are supposed to preserve? What should Jamie Bernstein say yes and no to?

She spoke of a recent production of Candide at the Staatsoper in Berlin, directed by Vincent Boussard, that she referred to as the “Sprockets Candide,” after the old Eurotrash parody skit on Saturday Night Live. It was hit with a change-or-desist order from Boosey & Hawkes, Bernstein’s publisher. And you might have trouble getting permission for a production of West Side Story set on the moon.

But Ms. Bernstein said her main consideration was getting her father’s music, especially the lesser-known works, as wide an audience as possible. That was what eventually led to the approval of the Trouble in Tahiti suite.

“If more people hear that music, great,” she said. “What’s the objection?”

Even if the opera’s critique of the suburban American dream can feel a little been-there-done-that after American Beauty, Mad Men and the rest, Trouble in Tahiti seethed with personal passion. The unhappily married central couple was originally Sam and Jennie, Bernstein’s parents’ names, though the wife’s was changed to the more singable Dinah (the name of a Bernstein grandmother). Like their namesakes, Bernstein’s parents fought bitterly, and their acrimony often resulted from the family’s frequent relocations; as Sam made more money, their houses grew larger.

Bernstein translated these frustrations and sour memories into music of bitterly winking good humor. At Orpheus’s rehearsal at Riverside Church, people kept mentioning the need to make the instrumental lines “sing.”

The opera and Mr. Chihara’s suite both begin with a bluesy, deceptively optimistic clarinet riff. Bernstein used, as a kind of Greek chorus, a trio of singers whose music has the smoothly peppy style of radio shows of the period. Mr. Chihara translated their opening number, “Mornin’ Sun,” into the brasses: muted trumpets and trombone.

The sunny opening quickly leads into a surging rendition of the aching melody of “There Is a Garden,” the account Dinah gives to her therapist of a dream she’s had, a vision of escape and a different life. As if to illustrate the life she’s desperate to leave, the orchestra moves into “There’s a Law,” the boisterously chauvinistic song that Sam sings in the locker room of his gym, before a calypso-tinged excerpt from “What a Movie,” in which Dinah describes a dance number in the cheesy film she’s just returned from (the movie is called Trouble in Tahiti). Finally, a solo cello—not in the original score—introduces the opera’s grim, brave ending, with nothing changed and little learned.

“If Lennie can do it,” Mr. Chihara said with a smile, speaking of the famous solo cello introduction to “Somewhere” in the West Side Story Symphonic Dances, “so can I.”

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Keith Connolly, Bobby McElver (top), Brian Mendes (middle), Andrew Schneider (bottom), Ari Fliakos. (Photo by Michael Schmelling)

“This isn’t what we normally do, take a play and simply stage it,” Ari Fliakos said over the phone recently.

Mr. Fliakos is an actor and a company member of the Wooster Group, which since its founding in the late 1970s has become one of the most influential theater ensembles in the world. No one would accuse the group and its director, Elizabeth LeCompte, of staging anything simply. Since long before the Internet era, their shows have conveyed a complex, fractured, frightening, seductive sense of information overload.

So the strange thing about watching the group rehearse Early Plays, its new production of three little-known Eugene O’Neill one-acts, at St. Ann’s Warehouse last week was what it wasn’t: it wasn’t the Wooster Group we’ve come to know.

In Wooster Group productions there are often too many things happening on stage to take in at once. Voices are amplified and altered; the actors move with carefully choreographed chaos; video screens seem to be everywhere. The Group’s 1993 production of O’Neill’s iconic play The Emperor Jones alternated frenetic activity and eerie stillness, the ingenious sound design seeming to emanate from every surface. Its Hamlet, in 2007, recreated the play using, as model and “script,” the black-and-white footage of a 1964 filmed version starring Richard Burton. In 2002, The Observer called To You, the Birdie!, the group’s version of Racine’s Phèdre, “completely, utterly nuts.”

Early Plays, which opened on Feb. 15 and runs through March 11, seems, well, the polar opposite of nuts. The sound isn’t distorted; there isn’t any video; the acting is less stylized, more straightforward. The change is the person in charge: in a rare collaboration with someone other than Ms. LeCompte, the playwright and director Richard Maxwell has combined his own troupe, the New York City Players, with the Wooster Group actors for a production with a different spin on the Group’s experimental ethos.

As it happens, Mr. Maxwell was a Wooster Group intern in 1994, when they were preparing O’Neill’s Hairy Ape. “Watching those rehearsals I got a feeling from Liz of how much specificity matters when it comes to the moment-to-moment unfolding onstage,” he said. “I don’t think she and I really share an aesthetic, but there is a rigor underneath what we do.”

Early Plays brings together three of the four “Glencairn” plays, named for the fictional ship on or around which they are all set. Atmospheric, laconic and thick with varied accents, the plays date from the mid- to the late-1910s, just before O’Neill’s star rose with Beyond the Horizon, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1920, and Anna Christie, which did the same in 1922.

According to Mr. Fliakos, the Group chose the plays by serendipity.

“Someone had written ‘Sea Freight Returns’ on the calendar at the Performing Garage,” he said, referring to the space on Wooster Street in Soho that has been the Group’s home for over 30 years. “And Kate [Valk, a star of the Group since the beginning] thought it was a new work called Sea Freight Returns, but it turned out that it was just that the sea freight, the sets and things, was returning from a tour. But that gave us the idea of breaking out the sea plays again. They had been touched on when we had read through O’Neill’s stuff in the past. And this time Liz said, ‘Well, what do you guys think?’ And it just seemed right.”

But Ms. LeCompte wasn’t inclined to direct it, and asked Mr. Maxwell if he was interested. The Group had worked with other directors before, notably the downtown stalwart playwright Richard Foreman, but not for some time; Mr. Fliakos, who has been a full-time member since 2000, said he had never worked with anyone at the Group other than Ms. LeCompte. And Mr. Maxwell’s style in directing his own plays is a significant change: restrained, droll and almost affectless where the Wooster Group tends to be vivid and virtuosic.

“My thing is: we’ve got to hear the words,” Mr. Maxwell said. “We have to hear the text as unadulterated as possible. I want to give the text without selling it or spinning it, so that the audience can decide for itself.”

>> Hear Richard Maxwell's "I Am Yours," performed Jan. 24, 2012, the Wooster Group and the New York City Players.

“Rich has a philosophy that is so simple and so hard to put into words,” said Ms. Valk. “He doesn’t want to see acting that interferes with the clarity of hearing the writer’s words resonate in the space. You’re not watching ‘interesting choices’ made by the performer. Liz might put a lot of systems out there and ferret out the order from the chaos. With Rich it’s a journey that happens step by step. There’s not chaos. He’s making a score for us, little by little.”

The O’Neill plays are idiosyncratic and thick with dialects, sometimes almost to the point of incomprehensibility. There was a period in this production’s development when Mr. Maxwell considered staging plays of his own, written in response to O’Neill’s themes. He also flirted with synthesizing his own writing with the originals before settling on an evening of three of the plays (In The Zone didn’t make the cut) linked by several of Mr. Maxwell’s own folksy, keening songs, which will be performed by the company.

Working through, rather than around, O’Neill’s thorny language, the emphasis has been squarely on the clarity of the text.

“A lot of the Group’s aesthetic has been devoted to tricking ourselves,” Ms. Valk said. “For me this is like letting go of all these things that Liz has always set up for me almost to trick me into the outcomes of those performances. I’m not saying I’m a dumb mule—you have to be on your toes—but with Rich you’re out there in a different way.”

Ms. LeCompte is, by all accounts, keen on controlling every aspect of her productions. That she was willing to relinquish that control shows both a shift toward collaboration and a widening of the scale of the Group’s operations, and ambitions. During the development of Early Plays she has been in Hong Kong working on a video project as well as handling an upcoming retrospective of the Group’s film and video work at Anthology Film Archives and looking ahead to a major coproduction of Troilus and Cressida with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Straford-upon-Avon in August, part of the festivities surrounding the London Olympics.

She is 67 now, so partnerships like this one with Mr. Maxwell raise the question of what will happen to the Group when she’s no longer its leader. What, in the end, is essential to the Wooster Group? A person? A place? A style?

“There are three ingredients in the Wooster Group that I can’t imagine it being without: Liz, Kate and the Performing Garage,” Mr. Fliakos said. Ms. Valk laughed when The Observer told her he’d said that. “The constant is Liz,” she said, adding, “But Liz is bigger than the person. She’s always way out in front thinking of the future.”

In her program note for the Hamlet production, Ms. LeCompte wrote that the Group was acting like an “archaeologist inferring a temple from a collection of ruins.” Similarly, Mr. Maxwell’s set for Early Plays is an apt metaphor for his relationship to the Wooster Group’s history. He is using the same heavily abstracted, flexible “ship deck” design that the Group has used for its other O’Neill productions, but it is adjusted: rotated 180 degrees from how it appeared in The Hairy Ape and stripped of the elaborate video, audio and props that created the claustrophobic, enigmatic world of The Emperor Jones.

It is the same, but different. “In some ways this isn’t that big of a leap,” Mr. Fliakos said of the production. “In every piece we’re forced to create a new visual language, a new sonic language, a new way of dealing with technology.”

Or, as it happens, a new way of not dealing with technology. After years of working with new media and sophisticated effects, at rehearsal last week Ms. Valk attempted to maneuver a small platform on wheels alongside the stage: a makeshift rowboat attempting to dock with the ship. The wheels got stuck; the actors giggled.

“This is what happens when the New York City Players try technology,” Mr. Fliakos shouted, and everyone laughed.

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>> Hear Richard Maxwell's "I Am Yours," performed Jan. 24, 2012, the Wooster Group and the New York City Players.