Nézet-Séguin conducts a thoroughly satisfying "Don Carlo"

NEW YORK - Even if Verdi is your favorite composer and Don Carlo the most substantial of his 28 stage works, you could still be relieved that conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin wrapped up the opera 15 minutes under its near-five-hour estimated running time Monday at the Metropolitan Opera.

That's not to suggest the opera needs to be shorter. The opening night of this new Nicholas Hytner production was a clear-cut hit, with all working parts falling so easily into place that the hyper-alert reading of the score - so richly detailed as to warrant comparison to Herbert von Karajan - by the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director-designate could put you in a rare state of Verdi overload. Simulcast audiences on Dec. 11 may be even more intensely affected by so much ingenuity up close. The opening-night audience's ovations were perhaps muted by fatigue, but rarely have I seen an opera audience so unanimously satisfied.

Nearly twice the length of Otello, Don Carlo is an intimate epic. Set in 16th-century Spain, it reveals the court of Philip II from the inside out, going deep into everyone's inner lives before showing how they changed history. For all their power, the characters have so little personal freedom that they live in a state of house arrest. Those who break out of that die, in a plot structure that's like a noose tightening slowly around the necks of everybody you care about. Few productions convey that as well as this one - to be expected from Hytner, known to New Yorkers from the Broadway Miss Saigon and the Lincoln Center Carousel. He originated this production at London's Royal Opera with much of Monday's cast.

Early scenes, as designed by Bob Crowley, are fanciful, picturesque, and unrealistic: Wintertime scenes have neat paths through the snow, court scenes show women with color-coordinated red fans against a saturated yellow backdrop. Later, a darker realism sets in, showing a world in which pomp and glory are achieved at cruel human cost.