I like being roiled, but I had no problem with George Tsypin’s set, whose floor (whether as ballroom or battlefield) is a steep dome not too subtly suggesting Mother Earth. (Deonarian fell or dived–looked like the latter–from about the latitude of the Arctic Circle. He’s since been fired from his $30-a-night gig.) Times critic Anthony Tommasini found the dome “terribly distracting. How can you be swept away by the operatic drama when you are worried about the singers’ safety?” True, you couldn’t help feeling that the aristocrats’ waltzing and the soldiers’ goose-stepping must have been tricky. But you can listen to a tenor go for a high C without worrying he’s going to blow out his voice; why not enjoy what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult”?

So, aside from that, Mr. Gates, how’d you like the show? Well, it’s long (four-plus hours), elaborate (52 soloists, 227 extras, plus a horse, a dog and the goat) and structurally challenged: a conventional Italian-style boy-sees-girl, boy-sings-aria opera with a war tenuously grafted on. The first chorus of indomitable Russian peasants (remember, Prokofiev wrote this in 1943, when the Soviets were repelling the Nazis) stirred my heart, the second piqued my sense of camp and the rest of them had me checking my watch. Yet without all the tedious heroics, you wouldn’t get the revered bass Samuel Ramey as the aged Russian commander Kutuzov, tottering around on a slender cane while rocking you back in your seat with the authority of his dark, resonant voice.

The Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, who moves as elegantly as she sings, made her Met debut as the heartbreaker Natasha. She betrays the all-too-decent Prince Andrei (silver-haired star baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky) with the delightfully detestable Kuragin (tenor Oleg Balashov), then changes her mind, and you believe her every stupid and willful move. But tenor Gegam Grigorian outsang them all as the initially ludicrous and ultimately heroic Bezukov, a bespectacled, thick-legged loser in love with the undeserving Natasha: Hamlet’s soul in Falstaff’s body. Similarly, there’s a lean and mean opera inside Prokofiev’s overstuffed extravaganza, which its fatally ambitious composer had no interest in setting free. I wouldn’t see it twice. But even without Deonarian’s sure-to-be-legendary star turn, I wouldn’t have missed it.