So much is fascinating about the New York Philharmonic’s upcoming New York premiere of Gyorgy Legeti’s opera “Le Grand Macabre” that I don’t quite know where to begin. (The New York Times had a great story this Sunday.)

To start, the unique approach that the company is taking to producing an operatic work is a marvel unto itself. Most orchestras that perform operas present singers behind music stands, treating the work, as might be expected, from a symphonic rather than a theatrical perspective. This production, part of “a more experimental, potentially more exciting, agenda” being undertaken by music director Alan Gilbert, promises to bridge the two by way of technology and an incredibly creative and talented team of artists: filmmaker, designer, dressmaker and producer, with the potential to deliver the kind of “total music-theater experience” one would expect from the Metropolitan Opera.

“I call what we’re doing now live animation,” Mr. [director and designer Doug] Fitch said recently, showing a visitor around his studio. “It’s very much a practical solution to a technical problem. How do you put on a production when you have no flies, no trapdoors, no time, no money, and you have to share the stage with the orchestra? When you have live music of such superb quality to play with, it’s worth figuring out how to make the marriage work. So subversively, I make a little theater of my own, put on a show that I can rehearse in my living room and then just bring in an enormous, miniature production into the concert hall. And in order to make it large enough for anyone past the first row to see, it has to be filmed live and then projected.”

How cool is that? I’m completely in awe of the creative talent and ingenuity being employed here.

Due to the small production budget, the costumes created by four-time Tony winner and Met alumna Catherine Zuber will be limited to the soloists. But what amazing costumes they will be!

Ms. Zuber’s costume designs for “Le Grand Macabre” quote Bosch liberally. The transvestite’s eccentrically knotted gown is taken from a figure in “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” as Ms. Zuber recently pointed out in her studio. Elsewhere, subtler encryption is at work. The flaring neckline and collar of the dominatrix’s dress take the shape of a skate (the fish, not the footwear) in that same painting. “Nekrotzar’s head decoration is taken from here,” Ms. Zuber added, pointing to spiky vegetation in the polymorphously perverse “Garden of Earthly Delights.” “This piece is so strange. I’ve really been enjoying myself scouting for beautiful insanity. It put me in the right spirit.”

commedia dell’arte with a nod to medieval morality plays.

Frankly, just from reading the descriptions of the book and the complete individuality of the score, I’m prepared to love it already.

“Le Grand Macabre,” a vaudeville for the end of time, is set in motion when Death himself ascends from a tomb promising to annihilate the human race at the next tolling of the midnight bell. Rounding out a Rabelaisian cast are the goddess Venus, the boozer Piet the Pot, a cross-dressing astronomer, his dominatrix wife, a petulant boy prince who sings in the range of a castrato and sundry others.

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