The prolific French composer Pascal Dusapin counts among his spiritual forebears Edgar Varèse and Iannis Xenakis, whose music often seems scarcely of this universe. So it’s fitting that Dusapin should have attached himself to the otherworldly pageant of Dante’s 14th-century Divine Comedy, which traverses an underground Inferno, Purgatory at the Antipodes, and the concentric crystal spheres that constitute Dante’s Paradise. The opera’s premiere at Aix-en-Provence in 2022 met with mixed but intriguing reviews. Frédéric Boyer’s libretto (sung in Italian in deference to the source material) builds not only on Dante’s encyclopedic theological narrative but also on his weird little autobiographical novella La Vita Nuova, which combines narrative, poetry, and keys to poetic analysis. What links everything together is Dante’s devotion to Beatrice, who blazed into his consciousness when both were nine years old. Their paths seem to have crossed on only two occasions, both married other people, and Beatrice died at age 25. Yet in his mind, she reigned as his personal—sometimes stingingly strict—Virgin Mary. The original Aix production by Claus Guth, who sets the action in the present, now transfers to Paris, again conducted by Kent Nagano, a maestro unlikely to be fazed by Dusapin’s signature microtones. The Danish baritone Bo Skovhus, once the suavest of Don Giovannis, now an elder statesman of great authority, is new to the cast as Dante, with Christel Loetzsch as his younger self. The seasoned countertenor Donique Visse is cast as the Voice (singular) of the Damned (plural). —Matthew Gurewitsch