Israel's iconography is barbaric and crassly pagan, with jarring homages to the painter Magritte. Akhnaten was Pharaoh of a sophisticated culture, a multifaceted society whose monumental, lavish, and refined iconography reflected the elaborate, complex religious values of the day. Abetted by Hans Nieuwenhuis's direction, the images fused with the music to create a unique entity, far greater than the sum of its parts. For that work, based on the life and times of Mohandas Gandhi, designer Robert Israel created a stunning series of visual images which fully captured the period, the social strata, the colonial tensions of mid-century India. But even as a musical-theatrical encounter, ''Akhnaten,'' as seen at the City Opera (and earlier this fall at the Houston Grand Opera), is severely wanting, particularly to anyone who saw Glass's ''Satyagraha'' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music three years ago. Glass actually tends to talk of his pieces in terms of music-theater. ''Akhnaten'' is not, in any real sense, an opera, unless one chooses to think of all theatrically oriented voice-and-orchestra works as operatic. Also intermingled were the usual New York City Opera subscribers, used to non-challenging Puccini and Verdi, for whom the entire evening must have seemed arcane. The recent New York premiere of Philip Glass's newest opera, ''Akhnaten,'' found the New York State Theater abounding with the now-predictable assortment of types who have for the moment made Glass an ''in'' composer.

Akhnaten la opera review