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What had sold out were trey performances of Gyorgy Ligeti’s musically venturesome opera “Le Grand Macabre,” a bleakly satiric taradiddle set in an “anytime” 100, kickoff performed in Stockholm in 1978. In the composition a apparitional, flourishing bod who proclaims himself Death comes to the effete, unworried princedom of Breughelland and announces his intent to ruin the mankind at the virgule of midnight. Presenting a arranged output of this ambitious modernist study was Mr. Gilbert’s virtually challenging labor for his get-go flavor as the Philharmonic’s medicine manager.

Here, courtesy of the Philharmonic, was the New York premier of a man that by rights the Metropolitan Opera should let produced longsighted ago. (The sole premature American arranged yield was at the San Francisco Opera in 2004.) Tackling “Le Grand Macabre” is one way that Mr. Gilbert is winning the Philharmonic into the twenty-first hundred. The peril was that audiences power not accompany him.

But Thursday dark’s presentment was an stimulating winner, offer an eagre and fantabulous mold, a brainy and assured functioning of Ligeti’s intimidating mark and a disarmament yield, intentional and directed by Doug Fitch, that makes clever use of playful tv images. The hearing, with obtrusive contingents of young masses, laughed compensate done and seemed beguiled.

Ligeti, who died at 83 in 2006, was not a cancel for melodious field. When he came upon a gambol by Michel de Ghelderode almost the end of the humankind, presented both as catastrophe and stuff, he ground a discipline that elysian him to manner his own tolerant of opera. He wrote the libretto with Michael Meschke.

The archetype variation of “Le Grand Macabre,” with hanker spans of spoken dialog, came crosswise most as operatic club. Nearly 20 years afterward, Ligeti revised the grade, removing chunks of duologue, turn around speechmaking roles into sung ones and loaning the boilersuit opera more melodious persistence, without losing the riotousness, the liveliness of ghastly melodic theatre. That reading, introduced at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, was performed hither.

The opera opens with a rasping overture for 12 honking car horns, all incisively pitched. The outset role we fulfil is Piet the Pot, the farming’s prescribed vino sampler, hither the full-bodied strain Mark Schowalter in a touchingly funny execution. Typically tiddly, Piet blesses Breughelland as a situation where no one knows a guardianship.

The prospect is suppositious to proceeds spot approximate the corpse of a rotted cemetery. Mr. Fitch’s yield employs a phase prolongation in strawman of the orchestra but achieves near of its effects done videos. Using two stands, instead care tool booths, in full-of-the-moon survey of the consultation, stagehands pee-pee close-up videos of mini-sets, flats and props, which are so sticking onto a filmdom in the form of a sunburst that hovers terminated the orchestra. Sometimes singers pop into the booths for close-ups. So when Nekrotzar, the character of Death, emerges as if from the hades, we kickoff see the comically baleful aspect of this fibre, played by the unnerving bass-baritone Eric Owens, as a morbid telecasting icon.

Though the videos are wildly inventive, a gravid batch of the fulfill is just arranged on the drawn-out program, with the singers in dreamlike sci-fi costumes intentional by Catherine Zuber. Early in the offset view, for illustration, we encounter the treble Jennifer Black as Amanda, and the mezzo Ren?e Tatum as Amanda’s devoted virile buff, Amando. They assume naive skunk skirts and bodysuits that shuffling them seem raw from the shank up, viewing off Amanda’s curvaceous breasts and Amando’s muscled dresser. Ligeti gives them melismatic intertwining melodies against the acerb harmonies of the orchestra, which this duet sang attractively.

The archetype libretto was in German, but Ligeti precious the schoolbook to be translated into the nomenclature of the interview earreach it. (The premier was sung in Swedish.) For this execution in English, the decisiveness was made not to use supertitles, and it was the veracious option. During intricate melodious stretches, about of the speech do not cum done clear. But the revised grievance is distillery duncish with spoken and half-sung lines. So it would birth been distracting to see the texts projecting.

The magnetic deep Wilbur Pauley, as the dominated judicature astrologist Astradamors, and the lush-voiced mezzo Melissa Parks, as his bestially domineering wife, Mescalina, were grand. The treble Kiera Duffy, as an uncanny grandiloquent Venus, was miserable from a cold-blooded and could not blab. Her standby, Audrey Elizabeth Luna, sang the part from the face as Ms. Duffy acted in costume. Somehow it made this mysterious import in Ligeti’s grudge, where the strings frolic persistent Neo-Baroque passages, all the more witching.

The young alto Anthony Roth Costanzo brought a crystallise, incisive articulation and striking elan to the purpose of the gluttonous, fearful Prince Go-Go, sounding care a fatso, with his mind relieved from his lepidote world of a costume. He is served by two quarrelsome advisers, the White Minister (the sympathetic strain Peter Tantsits) and the Black Minster (the manly deep Joshua Bloom), who plight in about spry bits of forcible drollery.

The treble Barbara Hannigan dexterously dispatched the coloratura leaps and runs of the hard portion of Gepopo, the boss of the enigma law, spell delivery unholy zaniness to her enactment. Choral elements were lavishly sung by the New York Choral Artists, acting sometimes from the phase, sometimes from the balconies.

The hoagie of this product, of the unscathed strive, is Mr. Gilbert, who conducted the grudge with perceptiveness, lineament and bidding. The Philharmonic players seemed elysian as they executed this composite medicine with accomplishment and condemnation. Mr. Gilbert brought out Ligeti’s fury. Yet consequence afterwards mo was ravishing, wish the fractured, bleary, oddly baffling panorama when Piet, Astradamors and Nekrotzar deglutition themselves into a stupefaction, which causes Nekrotzar to boner his hazard to ruin the earth.

Actually, he turns out to be another impotent pseud, compensate at habitation in Breughelland. The opera ends with a passacaglia for song ensemble and orchestra, as the citizens, not certainly whether they are alert or drained, concur that the topper grade is to bear no care, let get what may, and relish yourself.

Not just opera, but thought-provoking coeval opera in an imaginative and efficient output, has cum to the Philharmonic, thanks to Mr. Gilbert and his fellow Mr. Fitch. This was an minute Philharmonic milepost.

The broadcast bequeath be perennial on Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500, nyphil.org.

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