Any festival in a big city needs to offer something radically different from normal fare, or it doesn’t deserve to be called a festival. This hurdle is surmounted triumphantly by the Lincoln Center Festival with its production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten,” or “The Soldiers,” which opened on Saturday, not simply because it has chosen a complex, modernistic opera as its musical centerpiece but because it has staged it in the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.

 

The Armory and its suitability for classical music have been in the news of late, but apart from a concert of Stravinsky choral music in April, this is the first event since the start of the refurbishment, still in progress, of the late 19th-century edifice as a performance venue. With interior rooms designed by the likes of Louis C. Tiffany and Stanford White, the place is gorgeous. But general conclusions about how the Drill Hall might function in the future are difficult to draw from “Die Soldaten,” because of the utterly sui generis nature of the production by David Pountney. Yet “Die Soldaten,” a grim tale of a girl’s degradation by soldiers, decisively shows that the Armory’s size can be a powerful asset that also offers a remarkable degree of intimacy.

The production comes from the RuhrTriennale, the festival situated in the former industrial heartland of Germany known as the Ruhr district. The current artistic director of RuhrTriennale, Jürgen Flimm, has pointed out that Zimmermann envisioned a venue other than a traditional opera house for his opera; indeed, the composer’s original plan called for 12 different performing areas so that scenes from different time frames could be performed simultaneously. At RuhrTriennale, “Die Soldaten,” first seen there in 2006, was performed in a former steel mill.

The interior of the steel mill was roughly the same size as the Drill Hall, so the production could be brought over with minimal conceptual changes. Yet the staging is so elaborate that the costs of importing it must have been extraordinary (the festival has not specified a figure). Crucial to the concept is the ability to move the entire audience, which in the Armory consists of nearly 1,000 people, forward and backward on specially constructed rail tracks so that it views scenes from different distances. The Drill Hall, perhaps more than any other building in New York, resembles an old shed-style train station.

Most of the action takes place on a ramp, designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, that runs through the audience, although some plays out on a perpendicular strip at the very front, toward which the audience slowly rolls at a few points. Further to the sides and against the walls are, respectively, the huge battery of percussion called for by Zimmermann’s score and the similarly huge orchestra proper.

In this context, the sad story of Marie, a naive girl who loves the simple merchant Stolzius but sees marriage to a well-to-do officer as a path to social advancement, unfolds with the performers in unusually close proximity with the audience. The resonant acoustics of the Drill Hall give a special intensification and robustness to the wrenching, often brutal sonorities of Zimmermann’s 12-tone score, unconstrained by the limitations of a conventional orchestra pit.

Mr. Pountney’s staging, terse and unfussy, makes the most of the considerable advantages of the setting while achieving some of the multiple scenic effects Zimmermann was after. Act 2, for instance, closes with two elderly women discussing Marie’s future, but Marie and her lover, Baron Desportes, can be seen carrying on in the distance. “Die Soldaten” is not really an anti-war opera, but uses soldiers as a metaphor for an uncaring society. Mr. Pountney captures their potentially dangerous camaraderie with, among other things, an amusing steam bath scene. And the scene of Marie’s rape, which involves her and two doubles, is powerfully done. Far from updating the action, Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes have a Victorian look that well suits a work based on a late 18th-century source, a play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.

Overall, the production works so well that it almost seems a shame to dismantle the tracks when “Die Soldaten” is over. At intermission, one colleague said he would like to see Wagner’s “Ring” staged like this.

For a few decades after its 1965 premiere in Cologne, “Die Soldaten” was all the rage, hailed as the third great 12-tone opera, after Berg’s “Lulu” and Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aaron.” Like most of the other output by Zimmermann, who committed suicide in 1970, it is full of angst. One almost expected the score to sound dated, as other tense Expressionistic works often do nowadays. Yet, no doubt in part because of the invigorating setting, the fiercely complex score proved to be an absorbing musical tour de force. But it did not emerge as the great opera some have held it to be. “Die Soldaten” in significant respects tries to do what Berg’s “Wozzeck” does better. Marie never emerges as a truly interesting character and her downfall almost seems contrived.

Claudia Barainsky brilliantly negotiates Zimmermann’s treacherously angular vocal writing with a beautifully focused soprano. Claudio Otelli, as Stolzius, Johann Tilli, as Marie’s father, and Peter Hoare, as the Baron, deserve mention among the excellent cast of nearly 40. The conductor, Steven Sloane, and the Bochum Symphony revel in the score’s complexity as they give a bold and exciting performance.