When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for “The Comet/Poppea,” you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It’s a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you’re not supposed to be.
Being where you’re not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero’s mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis’s “The Comet” (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event.
The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center.
The audience for “The Comet/Poppea,” which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of “The Comet”; the other, where “Poppea” plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers.
This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of “a visual and aural spiral,” as Sharon writes in a program note. But while “The Comet/Poppea” tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge.
That isn’t the fault of either side of the title’s slash. “Poppea,” with its exquisite Baroque formality, was an early pinnacle of opera. “The Comet,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music this year, is a gem of brooding melancholy, with a slithery, anxious score touched with faint memories of period jazz.
Based on a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois, Douglas Kearney’s libretto centers on Jim (Davóne Tines), the Black man seeking refuge in the restaurant after a comet decimates New York, and Julia (Kiera Duffy), the white woman who stumbles in after him. The two — as unlikely a pairing as “Poppea” and “The Comet” — form an uneasy, enigmatic partnership, with their fractured memories and Lewis’s sober vocal lines evoking the stunned aftermath of unfathomable destruction.
At a time when many new operas feel set up to fail as part of seasons in which they’re performed alongside time-tested masterpieces, it is moving to see Lewis’s work in effect demand a place next to Monteverdi, and earn it.
The two pieces sometimes sing out individually, but often they’re happening at once: Leading an ensemble of 10 that mixes Baroque and modern instruments, the conductor Marc Lowenstein nimbly guides this musical ouroboros as restrained antique harpsichord flows seamlessly into spiky skittishness and back again. Mimi Lien’s set, John Torres’s lighting and Oana Botez’s costumes vividly contribute to the juxtaposition.
All eight singers are good, but Tines and Duffy are superb, full of emotion yet without strain. It’s largely because of them that, while “Poppea” is one of my favorite pieces, I kept wishing that I was watching “The Comet” alone.
That’s the problem. For the Industry, Sharon’s company in Los Angeles, where “The Comet/Poppea” premiered last year, he has done an opera over headphones in the middle of a train station; an opera in a couple of dozen cars driving through downtown; an opera in a park that put the audience on different routes through a baffling piece about Manifest Destiny. Directing “La Bohème,” he started with Act IV and ended at the beginning.
Those productions amply delivered on potentially gimmicky premises. “The Comet/Poppea” is un-Sharon-like in being more intriguing in concept than in execution. “Sweet Land,” that Manifest Destiny work, also gave different parts of the audience substantially different experiences. It was even more ambiguous and puzzling than “The Comet/Poppea,” but its mysteries were more compelling. On Wednesday, when the two worlds eventually began to melt together, it wasn’t as imaginative or haunting as promised.
Credit goes to Lincoln Center, though, for presenting it, along with the whole AMOC residency over the next few weeks. Emerging from the pandemic, the center seemed like it had pulled back from serious, significant music programming, be it Baroque or contemporary — a depressing dereliction of its half-century duty.
But the Run AMOC Festival, a dozen events strong, is a heartening sign that ambitious, creative work is still on offer at the nation’s leading performing arts institution.
The Comet/Poppea
Through Saturday at the David H. Koch Theater, Manhattan; lincolncenter.org.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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