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‘The Exterminating Angel” (2016), which had its American premiere on Thursday at the Metropolitan Opera, is based on the surreal 1962 film by Luis Buñuel, which Thomas Adès’s kaleidoscopic music transforms into a scarily contemporary comedy, a kind of modern “Falstaff” in which the cosmic joke is on everyone.
A group of aristocrats at a fancy post-opera dinner party find themselves mysteriously unable to leave at the end of the evening. Deprived of the structures and comforts—food, water, privacy, servants—that sustain their…