NEW YORK (AP) – High-tech circus meets grand opera.

That’s a quick way to sum up the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Hector Berlioz’s masterpiece, “La Damnation de Faust,” which opened Friday at Lincoln Center.

It took computers and motion-sensitive cameras to create the pulsating water, fire, sky and grass that are the cinematic backdrop for the drama.

Even digitally generated birds cross the heavens in response to the tenor’s fluctuating voice, triggered by a transmitter attached to the singer.

The spectacle was directed by Robert Lepage, creator of a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, who brought both art and athleticism to the Met stage with what he calls his high-tech “toys” – the latest in motion and sound technology.

The production features an all-star cast: tenor Marcello Giordani in the title role of the lonely, aging scholar Faust; mezzo-soprano Susan Graham as Marguerite, the object of the fleeting sexual ecstasy that destroys him; and bass-baritone John Relyea as Mephistopheles, who has a devil of a good time engineering the debacle.

With stupendous outbursts of vocal intensity, the choristers drove the drama from a raucous mock-fugue in Latin to demons singing triumphantly of the “mystery of horror” to the hushed, heavenly voices at the end, capped by singing children dressed in white. The chorus brought an incandescent spiritual power to the production – in contrast with the muscular athleticism of figures climbing the sets like high-wire circus performers.

The Met stage was dominated by a scaffold divided into two dozen panels – a framework for projections changing with each scene. At one point, the ladder that serves to mount Faust’s scholarly bookshelves becomes part of a crucifixion, with a Christ-like human figure suspended from it.

“La Damnation de Faust” is to be transmitted worldwide in movie theaters as part of “The Met: Live in HD” series on Nov. 22 at 1 p.m. EST.