'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.

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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.

editorial@observer.com

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

Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung.” Photo by Ken Howard. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began.

Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, the first Ring installment. Bathed in blue light, the monumental set of 20 enormous planks levitated in silence, like something out of Kubrick. The music began: that long, low E-flat that in Wagner’s ears was the sound of the birth of the world. Then, like the music, the machine began undulating—first slowly, then faster. My mouth fell open; I was looking at the river Rhine.

For a minute or two, it was magic: everything felt possible. In the 15 hours of the Ring that Mr. Lepage has given us since then, there have been other heart-catching moments in which the visual spectacle and Wagner’s stirring, searching music alchemically combined. There’s even one in Götterdämmerung, right at the start of the score, when deep chords sound and the machine swoops upward, like a charmed snake.

It is no surprise that the most memorable sequences of this Ring have come at the beginnings of the operas, since the defining problem of Mr. Lepage’s cycle is his inability to sustain visual or dramatic interest for more than a few moments. In an epic, complex work that requires that sustained intensity, Mr. Lepage has been plainly at sea, nowhere more so than in Götterdämmerung, his most timid, dully conventional installment yet.

As he did in the other three operas, in Götterdämmerung Mr. Lepage shows greater interest in the workings of his set than in his characters. In the first scene of the first act, a large central panel majestically swings around for no apparent reason; no one has used the doorway that the slow rotation replaces with a wall. But while we are puzzling over the pointless mechanics, we have lost a crucial opportunity to pay attention to and learn about Gutrune, the complicated, conflicted character standing in front of us.

Immense effort seems to have gone into how to transition the elaborate video projections from a rocky beach back to the Gibichungs’ hall. Comparatively little attention has been given to what, exactly, the mood is inside that hall. Wagner tells us plainly that the Gibichung siblings are melancholy, lovelorn, childless, and vaguely incestuous, but all that is unreadable here. What does Gunther think about Gutrune? Gutrune about Gunther? Hagen about either of them? If Mr. Lepage has any idea, he doesn’t reveal it to us. By the time the director makes what seems like a conscious, even interesting choice—to focus on the sorrowful Gunther during Siegfried’s funeral march—we don’t know or care enough about Gunther for it to register.

Over the course of the cycle we’ve grown used to Mr. Lepage’s much-heralded projections picking up some of the slack of characters that never quite come alive. Yet the visuals are more halfhearted in Götterdämmerung than in the previous operas. One of the selling points of the projections was their remarkable, seductive interactivity. When Alberich waded in the Rhine in Das Rheingold, his every step dislodged some loose pebbles; little circles of fire flared up around Loge when he walked.

Whether it’s due to limitations of time, money, or inclination, that’s all gone: when Hagen and Gunther walk into the Rhine in Götterdämmerung, they are simply walking on a projection of water. It doesn’t matter, of course, except that we’ve been sold on the idea that this is what is important in Mr. Lepage’s Ring, that this is the cycle’s point.

There certainly isn’t a point about the work’s ideas to be found here. “Götterdämmerung is the only opera in the Ring that has a chorus,” Mr. Lepage says in an interview in the program. I’m glad he noticed. But you get the sense that he hasn’t thought much about why the chorus, made up of the Gibichungs’ subservient vassals, has been added here. Certainly, in Mr. Lepage’s blandly benign vision of pagan feudalism, there is nothing of Wagner’s own hatred of social hierarchies, his conviction that money and power corrupt everything, everywhere.

That would have been a story well worth telling, particularly in New York, particularly at the Met, in a time of gross social inequality and Occupy Wall Street. But relevance to our own time—indeed, to any time—may have conflicted with what Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, generously refers to in a program note as the production’s “literal but imaginative approach.”

The production is in actuality about as imaginative as Fabio Luisi’s well paced and well-balanced, but less than poetic, rather faceless conducting. The orchestral performance is in keeping with the general spirit of this Ring, which at its most competent achieves a smooth corporate sheen.

Hulking and calm, with a rich voice of utter steadiness, the bass Hans-Peter König delivers the finest vocal performance of the cycle as Hagen, but why is he playing this malevolent character so kindly? If this is his and Mr. Lepage’s choice, it introduces a level of subtlety that this simple-minded production can’t encompass.

By the third act Stephen Gould showed some signs of strain as Siegfried, but he sang throughout with sensitivity and a big, rounded tenor more appealing than the bright edge of Jay Hunter Morris, with whom he is alternating in the role. The soprano Deborah Voigt closed her first-ever Ring cycle sounding as she has in the other operas: brave, underpowered, and shrill. Other Brünnhildes have been memorable despite similar vocal shortcomings, but Ms. Voigt is too busy keeping afloat to point the text. The broad emotions are there—anger, love, stony resignation—but they are as generic as the silent-film gestures she keeps resorting to. Her estimable reserves of energy don’t have focused direction.

Ms. Voigt did some of her most exciting singing in the scene with her sister, Waltraute, sung by the brilliant, urgent, wildly committed mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier. Passages of purely lovely singing alternated with rougher patches, but Ms. Meier’s cameo was the first and only time in the entire cycle that we experienced a character who actually seemed invested in her own story, that we got a sense of the scope and urgent stakes of Wagner’s work. There was finally something to care about.

Mr. Gelb has his own explanation for the opposition to Mr. Lepage, who was loudly booed on this production’s opening night. He writes in his program note, “Of course, because our Ring is revolutionary, not everyone supports it.”

But Ms. Meier’s success in the midst of so much failure was a reminder that Mr. Lepage’s production is, at heart, less a forward-thinking one than it is a throwback to the hyperrealistic Franco Zeffirelli spectacles that have long clogged the Met’s repertory. As anyone who’s seen enough Zeffirelli knows, the productions are utterly mutable. Like Mr. Lepage’s Ring, they are grand spaces in which stick figures are moved around. They ignite when you have compelling performers and sink when you don’t.

That has been the traditional character of the Met: dependence on charismatic singers for its artistic and financial lifeblood, with desultory attention paid to theatrical values and intellectual point of view. I understand why Mr. Gelb is eager to mark his tenure as a “revolutionary” shift from that ethos, but saying it doesn’t make it so. His Met is functioning in the same way that this great, flawed company has always functioned, with a couple more Tony Awards in the directorial credits.

Mr. Lepage’s Ring began with jaw-dropping clarity; its great disappointment has been its subsequent confusion. After tens of millions of dollars and six or seven years of development, there is no evidence that Mr. Lepage, an artist renowned for his visual and conceptual imagination, has a coherent, consistent sense of his production: the level of stylization versus naturalism, what the projections signify, how the stage space is organized, the difference between the narrow strip of stage near the orchestra pit and the “trench” behind it, how the characters interact with the projections and each other, how the aesthetic values—costumes, projections—changes over the course of the cycle.

The anticlimactic apocalypse of Mr. Lepage’s finale—capped, I kid you not, by little explosions that burst open the heads of white statues representing the gods—elicited more chuckles and eye rolls than shock and awe. And the return to the undulating Rhine in the final bars left me unmoved, a reprise that emphasized how empty the intervening 15 hours had felt.

If you haven’t created a convincing world, who cares how it ends?

The Enchanted Island.

When the critic James Jorden proposed in November that Robert Lepage’s woeful Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Ring cycle be scuttled and handed over, stage-filling set and all, to the directors Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, he was only half-joking. His recommendation had a serious side.

In their production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, which came to the Met from the English National Opera in 2008 and was revived here in November, Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch combined old-fashioned theatrical techniques and video projections, demonstrating precisely the qualities needed to produce a memorable Ring: a sense of scale, wonder, and spectacle that amplifies the characters’ dramas rather than distracting from them.

They’ve shown those qualities again in The Enchanted Island, an airy 18th-century-style pastiche of Baroque arias by Handel, Vivaldi, and others set to new English lyrics in a plot that imagines the lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream washed up on the island of The Tempest. If the result, which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve, is nowhere near as consequential or successful an opera as Satyagraha, Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch have approached it with the same pleasing mixture of seriousness and lightness.

Take the sequence in which the lovers’ ship is caught in the magical storm. We first see the characters on a cheerfully fake boat, sailing on cheerfully fake wood-cutout waves. (The set is old-fashioned: a series of receding prosceniums and flats that open and close to create different playing spaces.) Then, as the storm begins, projections of dark, roiling water begin encroaching on the idyllic scene. The sinking of the ship is almost unsettlingly vivid; the waves really seem to rise and threaten the entire stage and the audience itself.

It is a purely theatrical moment. Mr. Lepage’s Ring has these striking visual coups, too, but he doesn’t show any interest in human beings. Mr. McDermott and Mr. Crouch do, directing their singing actors with wit and feeling.

The problem is that there is only so much wit and feeling to mine in this all-star Enchanted Island. It’s watchable—which is saying a lot for the Met these days—and the patchwork of arias fits together without too many seams showing. The singers seem to be having a delightful time. But it still seems an awful lot of resources to throw at something so insubstantial.

The concept and script are by the British jack-of-all-trades Jeremy Sams, but the original idea was that of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. In a New York Times preview, Mr. Gelb put his foot in his mouth yet again, saying of the new production, “I wanted to play the Baroque card, but with a faster dramatic rhythm tailored to modern attention spans.”

Not only is that grotesquely insulting to the Met’s audience, but it makes no sense. It’s an especially stupid statement given that the Met has just finished an engrossing, moving revival of Handel’s Rodelinda, one of its best shows yet this season and one that seemed eminently well suited to modern attention spans. When a Handel opera—or a Lully, or a Vivaldi—is going on all burners, it seems to move along just fine.

If you do occasionally feel the length of these Baroque works it’s because they are, in fact, long. But they’re also riveting. The best of them, like Rodelinda, are cohesive dramatic works. The period was all about virtuosic performance, but it was performance with a point. Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare or Grimoaldo in Rodelinda change throughout their operas, their dazzling arias delineating their characters with a subtlety that remains startling today and which Mr. Sams struggles to give to his Enchanted Island denizens.

The emphasis here is on a vaguely defined, mostly irritating sense of “fun,” epitomized by the terminally perky Ariel of the shrill soprano Danielle de Niese, rather than convincing or involving emotions.

There is a lot of mugging and not a lot of depth. The witch Sycorax (an unseen presence in Shakespeare’s Tempest and here played by the artful and smooth, if sometimes underpowered, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato) has been given a thin back story: she was loved, left and embittered by Prospero (the sensitive countertenor David Daniels). Prospero, ostensibly the opera’s central character, remains a cipher, with a sudden, anticlimactic transition to begging forgiveness, to the aching tune of “Ch’io parta?” from Handel’s Partenope, at the end.

The younger singers are the highlights, particularly Lisette Oropesa (Miranda) and Layla Claire (Helena). Luca Pisaroni is strong-voiced as Caliban, but he was so impressive this fall as Mozart’s Leporello because he was responsive to all of that famous part’s nuances. There aren’t many nuances here.

The conductor, who also played a role in choosing the repertory, is William Christie, one of the world’s great Baroque masters. He was more in his element here than at his Met debut in 2010 conducting Cosi fan tutte, but there were long stretches in which he pushed the tempos relentlessly without seeming really in sync with the singers. The orchestral textures were thicker than they should have been, and the Met’s players have shown themselves capable of better in this repertory: they were fantastic under Harry Bicket in Rodelinda.

But the musical values are not the issue, nor is a production that does its best with the material it is given. The problem is a basic concept and script that is playable but hardly as memorable as the works it mines for melodies. With over three hours of music, it’s also far from streamlined. If Mr. Gelb wanted a Baroque work “with a faster dramatic rhythm tailored to modern attention spans,” he will have to keep looking; the first act in particular lags badly.

In the great Baroque works, you are never aware of the elaborate calculations that give all the singers their fair share of arias while maintaining musical and dramatic continuity. At their best, these pieces don’t feel like parades of numbers, with the next singer waiting in the wings for his or her moment. But The Enchanted Island does. It has more in common with a decent gala concert than a real opera.

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Marina Poplavskaya in "Faust." (Metropolitan Opera)

The question posed by the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Gounod’s Faust, other than how long Peter Gelb intends for us to endure what increasingly seems like a willful parade of directorial incompetence, is what is to be thought about Marina Poplavskaya.

Ms. Poplavskaya, who played the lead female role of Marguerite, is one of those singers about whom there is genuine debate. People aren’t quite sure what to make of her. Though she has starred in three major new productions at the Met in the past year, she isn’t a popular star, exactly. You’d be hard-pressed to find a random New Yorker who recognized her name.

But she’s not a connoisseur’s favorite, either. Opera lovers tend not to have liked the long profile about her that appeared in the New Yorker last year (which is also the only reason a wider audience would have heard of her). Written by the legendary journalist Gay Talese, it was a funny, delirious celebration of the kind of diva thought to be a thing of the past, the kind of diva even diehards have come to be embarrassed of.

Near the beginning, Mr. Talese writes about her reluctance to have him visit her in Russia due to a rash of forest fires. “She relented,” he writes, “asking only that I bring from New York as many surgical masks as I could find.”

Later in the piece Ms. Poplavskaya hauls her bags in a luggage cart across 14 lanes of Buenos Aires traffic when she abruptly decides to move from one hotel to another. At one point she and Mr. Talese appear not to be on speaking terms: “It was my fault that she had sung so poorly,” he surmises from her attitude during their interaction after a rehearsal. (It’s not a strategy I’d generally recommend singers try with writers, but Mr. Talese seems, like a long line of older men before him, ultimately entranced by her.) In sum, she comes across seeming rather mad, which is the usual evaluation of her by her colleagues.

The morning after the Faust premiere The Observer received an email from an opera aficionado comparing Ms. Poplavskaya to Delia Rigal, another vocally flawed yet compelling soprano (now largely forgotten) who had a brief but strong run at the Met in the 1950s. Ms. Rigal made her company debut as Elisabetta in Margaret Webster’s star-studded production of Verdi’s Don Carlo, which kicked off Rudolf Bing’s reign as the company’s general manager; Ms. Poplavskaya appeared last year as Elisabetta in another new Don Carlo, this one directed by Nicholas Hytner.

She was perplexing in the role, sometimes vocally hard-edged and uncertain of pitch but utterly magnetic. I keep returning to one moment, deep in the opera. Elisabetta has discovered that her lady-in-waiting, Princess Eboli, was once the king’s mistress, and banishes Eboli to a convent.

Before she does, she forces the princess to return a cross. It was entirely arresting, the way Ms. Poplavskaya held her hand out for the necklace, her back tense and her fingers painfully frozen. Her posture alone told you everything you needed to know about the character and her trajectory from innocence to experience. This, you were convinced, was a star.

A month later you were reconvinced, when she starred in Verdi’s La Traviata. (In both productions, Ms. Poplavskaya was in the right place at the right time, taking over the Carlo that was originally planned with Angela Gheorghiu and the Traviata that was intended for Anna Netrebko.) The first act, which requires dazzling coloratura agility, was difficult for her, and once again there were pitch problems and a persistent thinness of tone. But she hit her spots: in the second act she seemed physically transformed by Violetta’s tragedy. Opera lovers are often willing to accept many vocal shortcomings from singers who fascinate and move them, a phenomenon that has allowed Ms. Poplavskaya—who has striking looks that translate well to the Met’s high-def broadcasts—to be successful.

The Faust was perhaps her most satisfying leading role yet in New York. This was not the sentimental little-girl Marguerite generations of audiences have come to love. Of the lead performances, Ms. Poplavskaya’s was the most attuned to Des McAnuff’s hard-edged, industrial vision of the work, which Mr. McAnuff updated to the dawn of the atomic age. While the tenor Jonas Kaufmann seemed bored and the bass-baritone Rene Pape had a bit too much color for this black and white world, Ms. Poplavskaya’s cool, sometimes even raw singing somehow fit the skeletal catwalks and scaffolding that served as the unit set.

Her ballad about the King of Thule was more profound than simply melancholy; her Jewel Song had mania in its joyfulness. Near the end of the opera, delirious, her hair roughly cropped, Ms. Poplavskaya’s Marguerite seemed both personal and universal, the sound emerging out of her in a narrow, penetrating line.

But even her fine, thoughtful performance could not save the latest in a series of drab, bland new productions at the Met. As in Michael Grandage’s Don Giovanni, there was an arbitrary quality to the stage action in this Faust, which was energized by Yannick Nezet-Seguin’s warmly propulsive conducting but chilled by a vision that seemed less rigorous than harshly scattered. Handsome and with burnished tone, Mr. Kaufmann is the platonic ideal of the Romantic leading man but he seemed underdirected and at sea, ringing in climactic high notes but muted elsewhere.

It takes a very specific, very self-motivated singer to make a production like this work. The stage mostly just seemed empty; as in Robert Lepage’s Ring cycle, there were attempts to engage the eye with video projections, but these were particularly cheesy ones. Once again there seemed to be little coherence in a director’s work at the Met; Mr. Gelb tends to be convinced by a one-line concept or the phrase “Tony Award winner.” Ms. Poplavskaya is far more interesting than much of the rest of the production, but she is far less easily compressed into marketing copy.

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"Rodelinda."

It can be valuable to go to the opera in the same way that most people do: not to the opening night of a new production with the donors and critics, but to the third or fourth or fifth production of a revival. Nerves have settled; singers are used to their parts and to one another. There is still the tantalizing uncertainty that’s a part of any live performance, but you can be more confident that you’re getting a finished product. It’s on nights like these that you can get a real sense of an opera company.

Last week The Observer went to the third performance of Handel’s Rodelinda at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera had its Met premiere in 2004 as a vehicle for the soprano Renee Fleming, who repeated the title role in 2006 and is once again starring.

Part of our choice to see a later performance was logistical and part was curiosity. It has long been suggested about Ms. Fleming that she improves over the course of an opera’s run. The Observer has always discounted this notion, which seems conveniently to rationalize some poor reviews, but the contrast between Ms. Fleming’s first performance (which we heard over a live stream) and her third was indeed remarkable.

Opening night sounded messy: her voice lacked responsiveness and her coloratura was heavy and approximate, as it had been when she sang a revival of Rossini’s Armida in the spring. Her detractors have tagged her as “La Scoopenda”—a play on Joan Sutherland’s nickname, “La Stupenda”—for her habit of scooping up from one note to another, a pseudo-technique that gives a faint impression of lushness. It can work for a lazy lounge singer but in opera it comes across as muddy. At the first performance Ms. Fleming was scooping like crazy, attacking the musical line to try and power her way through ornamentation that was difficult for her.

But a week later, her voice sounded cleaner and less weighed down. The coloratura still didn’t come out with ideal ease but when the line was more lyrical she sang with lucid beauty.

Dramatically there has always been something a bit detached about Ms. Fleming’s performances. In Rodelinda she plays a queen who believes herself to be a widow; she agrees to marry Grimoaldo (sung by the strong and vocally agile tenor Joseph Kaiser), the man who deposed her husband, in order to save her young son’s life. Though the opera’s form is rigidly controlled—a parade of da capo arias—the emotions are vivid. Ms. Fleming seems to understand that tenderness and despair are required of her, but she doesn’t really make them happen. She has prettiness of voice and bearing but little urgency or directness.

It was telling that she interacted only in the vaguest way with the boy actor playing her son, who had a much more realistic and moving connection to the remarkable countertenor Iestyn Davies, playing the deposed king’s trusty aide, Unulfo. Making his Met debut in this run, Mr. Davies has a bright, penetrating voice and a keen musical intelligence; he phrased with utter naturalness and pointed the text with clarity. Not every countertenor can fill the Met, and Mr. Davies does it not with size but with clarity.

He fared far better than his colleague, the countertenor Andreas Scholl, who played the exiled king. (He made his Met debut in the part in 2006.) Mr. Scholl is an elegant, thoughtful artist and he began well, with a spine-tingling performance of his exquisitely longing opening aria, “Dove sei.” But his voice is smoother than it is focused; his faded-velvet tone tends to diffuse and disappear in the enormous Met. By his dazzling virtuoso closer, “Vivi tiranno,” his tone was even and his coloratura flawless—but he was practically inaudible.

Like Ms. Fleming, Mr. Scholl wasn’t a precise or truly engaged dramatic presence. Indeed, there is something arid about Stephen Wadsworth’s grandly naturalistic production, despite its constant high level of activity. There is enough movement—workers on ladders, shifting scenery and, yes, even a real live horse—to fill one of Franco Zeffirelli’s alternately adored and reviled spectacles. Why, then, are Mr. Zeffirelli’s productions regarded by connoisseurs as guilty pleasures (at best) while Mr. Wadsworth’s Rodelinda is well-reviewed and respected?

Part of it is Handel, who seems inherently classier than the 19th-century Italian warhorses with which Mr. Zeffirelli liked to play dress-up. The operas of the Baroque period were intended for much smaller houses than the Met, but Rodelinda scaled up nicely and its music is consistently spectacular. With Harry Bicket leading a stylish, focused performance—as James Oestreich observed in The New York Times, the Met orchestra had the snap and energy of a period band—the opera seemed to lack nothing in dramatic commitment and drive.

But there is still a sense that Baroque operas need to be helped along, that, unembellished, they are essentially boring. The da capo aria form can be relentless in its formal purity: there is an “A” section, followed by a “B” section (often in a contrasting mood) and then a repeat of the “A” section, usually with some degree of ornamentation.

Mr. Wadsworth has been praised for solving this “problem” and making Baroque opera work for a contemporary audience. He directs the arias with lots of action. Something on stage almost always happens to “trigger” the B section, and then something else happens to bring the mood back to A. But grafting a sense of modern dramatic continuity—Stanislavski-style “motivation”—onto a form that predates it sometimes leaves the singers, especially the less talented actors among them, looking less motivated than merely busy.

When Mr. Scholl sang “Dove sei,” when the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne used to sing “Vivi tiranno,”: in these moments, performance itself is the point. The content, the emotions, are clear just from the singing.

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"Dark Sisters." (Photo by Richard Termine)

It’s difficult to write about something you didn’t see, and The Observer didn’t see Robert Lepage’s new production of Siegfried, the third of four operas in Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Well, to be fair, we saw most of it. But in the final act at the second performance, two weeks ago, when the 24 seesaws that form the production’s giant set were supposed to morph, Transformer-like, into a fire-encircled mountaintop, there was a sudden loud noise and then everything went entirely, eerily still. A raging fire was projected over the stage—a supersized version of one of those Yuletide log screensavers—but the fact that the projection was a bit off, missing two of the seesaws, indicated that something was very wrong.

The point of the last scene in Siegfried is that the title character, our impetuous, youthful hero, finds the warrior maiden Brünnhilde trapped in a magical sleep within that circle of fire. He awakens her with a kiss, setting off a soaring love duet. But at the start of the scene two weeks ago there was no Siegfried, no sleeping Brünnhilde. After an awkward minute or two, the tenor Jay Hunter Morris and the soprano Deborah Voigt walked onstage from the wings. She lay down. He walked a few feet farther. Troopers both, they played the scene, Yuletide log a-blazing.

It was an embarrassing moment uncannily reminiscent of the opening night of the Met’s 2009-10 season, which was also the opening night of Mr. Lepage’s production of Das Rheingold, the first Ring opera. Then, too, the major problem came at the end, when Wagner’s gods were preparing to cross the rainbow bridge into their shiny new home, Valhalla.

The music surged and—nothing. Some projections of colored bars passed over the floor, the singers fidgeted, and after a few moments, they walked off stage and the opera ended. The Observer still doesn’t know what the end of the production is supposed to look like; we guess we’ll find out when the Met does a series of full Ring cycles in the spring.

The thought of sitting through 15 hours of Mr. Lepage’s work all over again, with the operas following closely on each other, is disheartening. His Ring is a folly. The fact that the 45-ton set doesn’t even function consistently is awful enough, an affront to the donors who gave millions for it and a disgrace in this economic climate. But the real problem is that it’s boring and underwhelming even when it does work.

All that time, effort and money, and for what? Some hypervivid projections of running water, a forest floor crawling with insects and that fire. They are all more or less impressive when they first appear, and uniformly dull after a minute or so. The singers look small, strange and unconvincing in front of them, as if the players remained in analog in an otherwise high-def broadcast of a football game.

The content of the projections seems to exist in our world, not the opera’s. The water runs at a steady, realistic pace; leaves blow like they blow in real life. But operatic time doesn’t work that way. It slows down and speeds up; it bends and stretches. Second by second, minute by minute, it is evolving. The disjunction between the music’s clock and the projections’ grows wearying. Mr. Lepage seems not to have noticed that his production, even when it’s functioning, is literally out of sync with Wagner. It gradually wears down the reality, the power, of what’s happening on stage, actively resisting our engagement with the characters. Mr. Lepage has created a production that his singers have to fight against.

And fight they did. Mr. Morris was brought on the week before the opening to replace Gary Lehman as Siegfried, one of the most daunting roles in opera. With penetrating tone and ample stamina, he was winning and watchable. Bryn Terfel seemed like he had finally made his peace with the production’s absurdities; obviously uncomfortable in Rheingold and Die Walküre, he sang more strongly here and a character—convincingly both impulsive and reflective—began finally to emerge. As in Rheingold, Hans-Peter König was darkly profound as Fafner.

The painful spectacle of Ms. Voigt’s Brünnhilde continued: a distinguished artist trying to will her way through a marathon role—a series of marathon roles—with vastly diminished resources. Doubtless the set failure unnerved her at the performance we saw in the house, and her acting was braver and truer in the “Live in HD” broadcast a few days later. She attacked the text with almost desperately overenunciated German, as if crisp consonants alone could make a Brünnhilde. But at both performances her voice was thin and her high notes weak. A phrase would emerge clearly and then sour.

Mr. Lepage and his team would have done well to travel a few blocks south of the Met, where the director Rebecca Taichman and the designers Leo Warner, Mark Grimmer and Donald Holder gave a lesson in the elegant, powerful use of projections and video in their production of Nico Muhly’s new opera, Dark Sisters. As in Siegfried, the natural world is integral to Dark Sisters: the desert of the American Southwest, where the story unfolds in a polygamist sect dealing with the aftermath of a government raid.

Over a rough, reddish-brown clay ground, the projections brought to life a slowly shifting landscape: dark clouds, a starry night, a CNN-style news show. Near the end, in the opera’s most thrilling moment, one of the five wives sings an aria from the edge of a cliff in the middle of a seething sky. Music, word and image all work in shiver-inducing tandem; of that Wagner would have approved.

Like Mr. Muhly’s first opera, Two Boys, which opened in London this summer and comes to the Met in the 2013-14 season, Dark Sisters engages with the world. It is serious but not self-serious.

The problem is that there are moods but there isn’t a story. Feelings are shared but they don’t add up to compelling people. To be more precise, the libretto (by the young playwright Stephen Karam) does sketch out a plot and characters, but Mr. Muhly seems uninterested in realizing them.

Two Boys had a much more overtly eventful libretto, with the engrossing propulsion of a Law and Order episode, but there, too, Mr. Muhly responded with music that was almost willfully opposed to specificity and urgency. He creates hypnotic, beautiful soundscapes; individual moments are shimmering and aching.

His writing for ensembles is magnificent: complex and surprising. There is a spooky interplay between the wives on the sect’s commandment to “keep sweet.” Mr. Muhly’s permutations and arrangements of religious hymns are dazzling. This seems to be where his heart is. Opera, though, requires other qualities, namely a dramatic acuity that he hasn’t yet demonstrated. His gifts remain ones worth watching, but something feels wrong about the allocation of such extravagant resources to a composer with so little evident affinity for the art form. Funnily enough it’s the same complaint one might have about another talented maker of flawed work: Robert Lepage.

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Basinski, 1994.

On a cold, drizzly morning last week, artist and journalist Ethan Pettit was standing in front of a big steel door in a stairwell in a nondescript loft building on North 11th Street. Mr. Pettit is a genial, hulking guy with broad, friendly features. Even with his curly, shoulder-length hair, matted down by the rain, he didn’t seem like a likely candidate for drag. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, he appeared as Medea de Vyse at parties and events throughout Williamsburg, including ones held in Arcadia, which was once on the other side of the steel door.

Arcadia was a nightclub that the composer and musician Billy Basinski set up in his sprawling loft apartment. From 1989 until 1997, it hosted concerts and readings and performances in a distinctly un-Williamsburg space.

There was velvet everywhere, and glass. New York’s avant-garde scene always likes to celebrate the gritty and the unfinished, but Arcadia had it both ways: located on a desolate block and in a grungy old factory, it was opulent, a throne room.

“It looked like a Baroque Venetian palazzo,” said Mr. Basinski in a telephone interview from California, where he now lives.

“It looked like a Weimar cabaret on some kind of drugs,” said Mr. Pettit.

Arcadia embodied a particular bohemian period in Williamsburg, a moment that is fading into memory more completely than equivalent moments in Soho or the East Village or the Lower East Side. But now that “downtown” culture has more or less moved entirely to Brooklyn, those heady Williamsburg years seem to have been a premonition. On Wednesday, Issue Project Room is hosting a gala benefit in honor of Mr. Basinski and his club in the McKim, Mead & White building in Downtown Brooklyn that it is renovating into a performance space, planned to open in 2013.

The evening includes the New York premiere of selections from Robert Wilson’s quasi-opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, featuring Mr. Basinski, Ms. Abramovic, and Antony, of the band Antony and the Johnsons, who did some of his first New York performances at Arcadia.

“We wanted to pay tribute to a club that was an inspiration to Issue Project Room,” said Ed Patuto, Issue’s executive director. “Billy’s Arcadia was a place where emerging artists could come and perform and try new things and that is very what we are about. It’s about giving artists and performers the opportunity to experiment. And for people to experience that.”

It’s hard to walk on Bedford Avenue now and imagine what it was like in the 1980s. Mr. Pettit pointed out the storefront on North Fifth where he lived starting in 1983 (it’s now a Subway sandwich shop). Other than the Senko Funeral Home on the corner, which is still there, he can remember a guy who lived on North Eighth and that’s about it. There were some Polish bars and music clubs up near Greenpoint, and some Latin ones on the south side of Williamsburg, but not much else as far as a cultural scene.

The first gallery Mr. Pettit remembers was one in Greenpoint called Minor Injury, which opened in 1985 and put on mostly group shows. (There was an annual “ego” show: Ego one year, Superego another, Trans Ego another.) A few others opened up in the following years—the Bog, Quiet Place, Ledis Flam—and a small music scene began to develop.

There were antifolk bands. There was a lot of theremin.

In 1989 an Irish woman named Terry Dineen and a Frenchman named Jean-François Pottiez opened a space called the Lizard’s Tail on South Sixth Street. It had a tiny stage raised a foot off the floor; the audiences would replace the beer when it ran out. It was a hit with artists, but not with the police, who had it shut down in 1990.

It had been made clear, though, that Williamsburg was able to sustain an active cultural and social life, and a small group of friends organized a party called the Cat’s Head in an old mustard factory on North First Street on July 14, 1990. There was a second iteration that October, and another party, called the Flytrap, the following June. At the same time, another group, called Lalalandia, was running its own events.

The parties were immersive and immense, jam-packed with installations and performances and eventually drawing thousands of people. The line between performers and attendees was intentionally blurred; the whole thing sounds like a cross between a rave and a children’s birthday party. People crawled up an enormous spider web made of rope; an artist named Dennis DelZotto made enormous inflatable environments.

Mr. Pettit claims that it wasn’t a drug scene, but there was something decidedly edgy about it.

“There was lots of yelling, lots of embarrassing behavior,” he said. “People taking their clothes off.”

At one of the events a man in a scuba suit sat in an aquarium and read The New York Times before emerging to throw himself into a forest of fluorescent light tubes. The artist Lauren Szold did a piece called Medea’s Period, consisting of a huge lake of “menstrual blood” made out of eggs, water and red food coloring.

“I was one of the people who wallowed in it,” Mr. Pettit said. “I was a transvestite having her first period.”

Mr. Pettit attended the events as both participant and observer. For years he edited a small newspaper called The Waterfront Week, an amalgam of proto-blog message board and Gossip Girl. Anyone could send in materials to the Ship’s Mast, a local dive bar; if it fit, it was printed.

One contributor to the July 1-7, 1993, issue wrote a surprising take down of Organism, a large party that had taken place several weeks before. “I’m not against having fun,” he wrote, “but is that all there is? At some point don’t any of you creative types intend to step forward and reveal some kind of luminous truth in your work? Org struck me as a decent enough warehouse party, but is that why you left Kansas?”

Into this environment stepped Mr. Basinski, who had run a music series in Downtown Brooklyn before moving to Williamsburg in 1989. He and his longtime partner, James Elaine, found the space on North 11th Street, fixed it up and began hosting concerts.

“There was a big steel door and you’d come into this mysterious palace with golden-looking floors and decaying columns,” Mr. Basinski recalled. “‘The Ballroom,’ we called it, and it was 20 feet wide and 70 feet long, with a recording studio on one side and a little stage on the other.”

The first party was a surrealist ball; other themes included “Angels, Demons, and Birds of Paradise” and “The Dying Salon.” (Antony performed at both of those; Mr. Basinski encouraged him to move away from his early experimental theater work and concentrate on his music.) The formidable avant-garde musician Diamanda Galas performed on Halloween 1992.

Arcadia was featured in a 1993 New York magazine article on “The New Bohemia” happening in Williamsburg, but as it got larger and larger, Mr. Basinski eventually tired of it.

“We had neighbors and we were all getting older,” he said. “You start something, you do it by the seat of your pants. That’s what artists do. They start something. It really does create economic development. The arts are the engine for economic development. Except artists are expected to keep moving to the next waste dump.”

Mr. Basinski now lives in California, the reason being that he can’t afford New York. The rent on his enormous loft crept higher and higher until his landlord was asking for $10,000 a month. The Williamsburg of 20 years ago is unrecognizable. The Lizard’s Tail is now a bike shop, a few doors down from the restaurant Fatty ’Cue. Mr. Pettit recognized the building only by its distinctive second-floor terrace, off of which an odd hanger-on to the scene nicknamed Evil Jim once fell.

“It’s inevitable,” Mr. Basinski said. “Money and the real estate boom. It’s just the way it goes, I guess. You’d like things to stay the same but they never do.”

Which is not to say that he’s overly sentimental. As it happens, while he and his partner are in town for the Issue gala, they’ll be staying with a friend who lives in the old neighborhood. Not in an unheated loft, mind you, but in one of the looming glass condo buildings on the river that together represent the end of Arcadian Williamsburg.

He laughed. “Crazy, right?”

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"Don Giovanni." (Courtesy Metropolitan Opera)

Even the most frequently performed operas aren’t performed very frequently—at least not in different versions in a single city. So it is remarkable that there have been no fewer than three major new productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in New York in the past two years.

In November 2009 Christopher Alden directed a bold, dark, ambiguously modern Giovanni for New York City Opera. During Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival this past August, Ivan Fischer both directed and conducted a bracing, stylized take on the opera featuring a ferocious performance from his Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Now the Metropolitan Opera has joined in, with the latest chapter in its recently troubled history with the work. A flawed 1990 Giovanni was replaced by a flawed 2004 Giovanni, and on Thursday that, in turn, was replaced by a new production by Michael Grandage, the artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse.

Mr. Grandage only began working in opera last year and the move came with high expectations, since his work on plays like John Logan’s Rothko-themed Red has been acclaimed for its stylishness and intelligence. But those two qualities are missing from his Met Giovanni, which is disastrously dull, a nonevent. Faced with Mozart’s complex masterpiece, which moves with rapid-fire speed from farce to horror to elegy and back again, Mr. Grandage seems stumped.

The result is a traditional production without the traditions that have made this opera so beloved: energy, detail, and honest feeling. Things were almost certainly thrown off-balance by the last-minute substitution of Peter Mattei for Mariusz Kwiecien, who underwent back surgery, in the title role. But Mr. Mattei performs ably, and the production’s problems, seen at the second performance on Monday, are too pervasive to be explained away by even a major cast change.

Christopher Oram’s pseudo-functional set is a series of moving buildings fronted by neat rows of Juliet balconies. This Advent calendar look is a favorite at the Met in recent years—the opera blog Likely Impossibilities published a compendium of the practice on Friday—and in this case it’s finished in the artfully weathered, faded-paint aesthetic of a Pottery Barn armoire. The dimensions of the Met are daunting, and a Hollywood Squares approach is one way to fill that enormous vertical expanse. But Mr. Grandage has taken few opportunities to really use the space, and the backdrop too often ends up looming distractingly over the action.

The performers are frequently forced to a narrow strip at the front of the stage, where they tend to sing in a row, looking as if they’re just going through the motions. Though the soloists are all experienced in their roles, they and the chorus seem to know in only the broadest terms what they are doing or what feeling they are meant to be conveying at any moment This lends the whole evening a deadening sense of detachment. The poignant, intimate moments between Zerlina and Masetto might, for their frigid emotional temperature, have been sung here by two strangers. When Donna Anna finally realizes it was Don Giovanni who attempted to rape her and then killed her father, the strong if sometimes shrill soprano Marina Rebeka seemed peeved rather than enraged.

Mr. Grandage has spoken in interviews about the importance to the opera of class dynamics—after all, the main engine of the plot is the uncomfortable, unexpected interactions between aristocrats, servants, and peasants. But the production ends up ignoring class almost entirely. Leporello (the charismatic, compulsively watchable Luca Pisaroni) mounts Donna Elvira (a sedate, underpowered Barbara Frittoli) during his Catalogue Aria, but she doesn’t seem even mildly miffed that a servant is taking such a liberty. The guests at Zerlina and Masetto’s wedding party don’t seem to find it odd or intimidating that a nobleman has suddenly entered their midst; conversely, they later act right at home in Don Giovanni’s villa, perhaps because it’s decorated and lit like a cheap bordello. It is his class that allows Giovanni to steal Zerlina with impunity, in broad daylight; if that isn’t made clear, and it isn’t here, the whole thing seems absurd.

It’s this lack of texture that keeps the production from ever achieving a sense of mood. There is a passing feeling of foreboding in the cemetery scene, which opens with shadowy hooded figures—copies of the Commendatore’s statue—in each of the Advent calendar slots, silhouetted against a yellowed gray sky. But the tension is broken by the embarrassing animatronic statue and its over-amplified voice, and when the same hooded figures are brought back as Giovanni is being pulled down (amidst risible shooting flames) into hell, the effect is silly rather than striking.

In an interview in the Met’s season book, the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, praises the way Mr. Grandage directs with “a cool and elegant aplomb that stays focused on the storytelling. He appreciates that the staging of a classic play has to please both knowledgeable and uninitiated audience members.”

This is code for the Met’s fear that conceptual or experimental productions of the standard repertory will alienate “uninitiated” opera-goers. Forget the blazing critical and popular success of Willy Decker’s stark, contemporary La Traviata last season: clearly, in Mr. Gelb’s mind, audiences will run from a Giovanni (or Le Nozze di Figaro or Cosi fan tutte) that doesn’t appear to have been set in a Restoration Hardware store, with bland period costumes and a blissful ignorance of the aesthetic, political, and moral issues that mattered to Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Like Robert Lepage’s first two installments at the Met of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the new Giovanni is desperate to avoid anything that could possibly be construed as ideology or updating or directorial intervention. In a recent interview Mr. Grandage said that high-concept productions tend to give only the superficial appearance of having reconsidered a piece, while his own, more traditional methods yield something more substantive.

“I think you can reinvestigate it from the inside, in a way that is about character,” he said.

But his production, like Mr. Lepage’s, has ended up lacking precisely the qualities you’d expect and hope would come through in such a “straightforward” take on the opera: characters, emotions, plot, basic interest. At one especially lethargic moment during the first act on Monday, the man on one side of me started scrolling through emails on his BlackBerry; on my other side, a man was dozing. Is this the vividly theatrical operatic experience that Mr. Gelb has promised us?

In the Met’s publicity, Mr. Grandage’s name is invariably accompanied by the phrase “Tony Award winner” (he got his trophy for Red). And you sense that the ability to tack on those words played no small part in Mr. Gelb’s decision to hire his similarly award-winning colleagues, Julie Taymor, Mary Zimmerman, Bartlett Sher, and Des McAnuff, whose production of Gounod’s Faust comes to the Met next month.

The idea is that these directors will bring two things along with them: a vibrancy perceived to be present in the theater world but lacking in opera, and a savvy audience that loved, say, Red but has steered clear of the Met.

In theory, everyone wins; in practice, we all lose. Ms. Taymor, Ms. Zimmerman, Mr. Sher and now Mr. Grandage have shown that the credentials that make good marketing copy don’t necessarily make good opera. His new Don Giovanni is worse than bad: it’s nothing.

editorial@observer.com