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Review: If You See One Opera This Year, Make It ‘The Exterminating Angel’

“The Exterminating Angel” at the Metropolitan Opera, featuring, in foreground from left, Iestyn Davies, Sally Matthews and Lucas Mann.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

Opera audiences are always trapped, in a sense, during a performance. At the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night, for “The Exterminating Angel,” even more so. Brilliantly so.

This adaptation by the composer Thomas Adès is a riff on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film of the same name, a surreal, bleakly comic yet disturbing fantasy about a dinner party gone to hell. In the film and the opera, an aristocratic couple invite a group of friends to their mansion for a post-opera dinner. For inexplicable reasons, both the hosts and the guests find themselves unable to leave the salon.

They are psychologically, though not physically, imprisoned.

When the opera had its premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, Mr. Adès explained that, to him, the guests suddenly experience an absence of will. What gets exterminated by some force — either internal, imposed or both — is the will to act. That theme came through powerfully in this stunningly inventive opera when it was performed at Salzburg. It came through even more viscerally on Thursday, when the work had its American premiere at the Met with Mr. Adès conducting.

The opera has discomforting timeliness at a time when many Americans feel trapped in partisan battles over elites, economic justice and borders; yet the will to change things is somehow lacking. The willpower of the ruling classes, or lack thereof, has become an especially pressing topic in Washington, as elected officials debate how forcefully to stand up to President Trump on policy and governing.

In a way, this production dares to confront audience members in the moment. Are we somehow complicit when we encounter art in a safe, gilded house? Or, in fact, can grappling with the arts, including this powerful opera, be a way to take action and exert will?

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Frédéric Antoun and sheep.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

In this audacious opera — for which Tom Cairns, the director of the production, wrote the libretto in collaboration with Mr. Adès — the music digs deep. Mr. Adès’s wild, searing score explores the emotional undercurrents of the story and fleshes out the horror of the characters’ situation.

My one reservation about the opera when I first heard it was that to some degree, Mr. Adès explored the dark side of Buñuel’s tale, which has been seen as a bitter critique of elite classes during Franco’s regime in Spain, at the expense of its bizarrely comic elements.

But after hearing it at the Met, I feel different. Mr. Adès’s thorny, modernist music, played with crackling precision and color by the orchestra, bristled with manic, almost madcap, energy.

Take the crucial opening scenes, which hew pretty closely to the film. The servants of the house, who somehow sense disaster coming, have fled; and the hostess, Lucía de Nobile (the bright-voiced soprano Amanda Echalaz) is frantic with embarrassment. Her prickly husband, Edmundo (the suave tenor Joseph Kaiser), is also utterly indignant.

But Mr. Adès captures both the tension and absurdity of the crisis in a complex ensemble. The hosts greet their guests with unctuous exchanges, while the visitors, in overlapping and comically elongated phrases, voice refrains of “Enchanted, enchanted,” as the orchestra erupts with jumpy outbursts.

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Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel,” based on a Buñuel film, had its American premiere on Thursday and runs through Nov. 21.CreditCredit...Monika Rittershaus/Salzburger Festspiele

The effect here is compounded by a prankish yet gripping touch in Mr. Cairns’s brilliant staging. The set (by Hildegard Bechtler, who also designed the costumes) shows a salon, with fine couches and glittering tables, framed by a large wooden structure that resembles an opera house proscenium. Only when the guests arrived onstage did the chandeliers in the Met’s auditorium start rising to the roof.

Though “The Exterminating Angel” is a true ensemble piece, Mr. Adès gives distinct character traits and defining musical moments to most of the 15 solo roles. The coloratura soprano Audrey Luna, whose stratospheric upper range was put to use by Mr. Adès in his previous opera “The Tempest” (presented at the Met in 2012) excels as Leticia, an opera singer who had starred in the performance the guests have attended: The dinner party is in her honor.

But as hours and days go by, and everyone becomes increasingly confused and degraded, Leticia unravels, dispatching accusations in vocal bursts that reach screechy highs, yet somehow sound angelic.

Another guest, Blanca, a pianist (the mezzo-soprano Christine Rice), agrees to play something. In the film, the character performs a snappy 18th-century keyboard piece. Mr. Adès substitutes his own haunting variations on a song from the Ladino tradition of Sephardic Jews, music that captures the ambiguity of the moment.

It’s as if Blanca is searching through music’s past for clarity and willpower, yet speaking in a confused modern voice. Blanca arrives with her husband, Alberto (baritone Rod Gilfry), a conductor, and Leticia’s colleague, who proceeds to fall asleep on a couch while confusion reigns.

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From left, Sally Matthews, Amanda Echalaz, Rod Gilfry, Christine Price, and (with back to camera) Audrey Luna.Credit...Emon Hassan for The New York Times

The soprano Sally Matthews brings a radiant voice and natural allure to Silvia de Ávila, a young widowed aristocrat who has a strangely close relationship with her prissy brother, Francesco (the vibrant countertenor Iestyn Davies).

Two tragic guests, in the face of unreality, seek solace together. Beatriz (the soprano Sophie Bevan) and Eduardo (the tenor David Portillo) are engaged and utterly absorbed in themselves. But Mr. Adès enshrouds them in the opera’s most rapturous music, an extended duet with sighing vocal lines and quizzical orchestral sonorities. In a suicide pact, the couple enjoy their first night of love in a closet, where they are later discovered dead.

The veteran bass John Tomlinson commands the stage as the elderly Doctor Conde, who is accompanied by his terminally ill patient Leonora, a needy woman obsessed with the occult, here the compelling mezzo-soprano Alice Coote.

As an opera composer, Mr. Adès often has the orchestra hug every note and syllable of a vocal line. This stylistic trait could easily be overdone. But the chords and sonorities he comes up with at once buttress and shake up vocal lines, so the effect, in his hands, lends intriguing dramatic complexity. Over all, this riveting, breathless, score — full of quick-cutting shifts, pointillist bursts, and episodes of ballistic intensity — may be his best work.

The anguished scene that will stay with me for a long while came late, a moment of motherly longing, when Silvia, now grimy, haggard and delirious, thinks about her little boy. She sings a fractured lullaby while caressing the head of a dead sheep (and how actual sheep come into the picture, I won’t give away). Silvia sounds as if she is recalling some distant, old hymn tune. Yet the disjointed orchestra grumbles ominously in its depths while miniature violins play weirdly high, skittish sounds.

In a timid Met season very heavy on the staples, “The Exterminating Angel” is the company’s one bold offering. If you go to a single production this season, make it this one.

The Exterminating Angel
Through Nov. 21 at the Metropolitan Opera; 212-362-6000, metopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: You Can Come In, but You Can’t Leave. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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