Eleni Calanos, in LoftOpera’s “Tosca,” seemed ready for a larger stage. Illustration by Matteo Berton

Last year, the British critic Philip Clark had a provocative response to the perennial question of how to save classical music from its so-called image problem—the perception that it is stuffy, élitist, and irrelevant. He declared, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it’s the wider cultural environment . . . that has a problem.”

I don’t accept Clark’s entire argument. Certain of classical music’s difficulties are self-created: ossified concert norms, brain-dead programming, a pervasive fear of the new. Yet his principal point holds. Endless chatter about the need to reinvent the art is symptomatic of a deep-seated hostility toward fundamental features of the concert experience: the extended duration of works, the complexity of their construction, the attention they demand. There is no shame in the fact that classical music has trouble adapting to a marketplace dominated by celebrity worship and by the winner-take-all economy for which celebrity serves as a seductive symbol.

Anyone tired of the disdainful clichés lobbed at classical institutions might initially look askance at LoftOpera, one of a number of small-scale New York companies that advertise themselves as alternatives to a decrepit establishment. Loft’s Web site declares, “Opera is not just for the rich and the aging. Opera is for the young, the edgy, and the emerging creative class.” Inevitably, Loft has won media attention with its us-against-them attitude, its hipster vibe, its habit of blasting pop songs during intermissions, its drink-as-you-listen policy. A typical headline: “While Large Operas Flounder, Small Companies Flourish.”

The Met, despite its perpetual financial struggles, shows no signs of capsizing. Though dozens of competitors have come and gone, it lumbers on, embattled but essential. What it offers—and what no pocket-sized company, however edgy, can match—is an acoustical environment commensurate with the grandeur of the form. To hear an unamplified voice surmounting a full orchestra and pinging across a large space is an elemental thrill that lies somewhere between high culture and extreme sports. The Met’s recent revival of “Don Pasquale” gave audiences a classic you-had-to-be-there rush, with the Mexican tenor Javier Camarena, as Ernesto, showing power and style from the bottom to the top of his range. The remarkable thing about Camarena is that he never seems to push his voice: it’s as if singing a high D-flat in a thirty-eight-hundred-seat theatre were the most natural form of self-expression.

Still, New York’s operatic startups—some others are Heartbeat Opera, On Site Opera, Amore Opera, Apotheosis Opera, Floating Opera, Opera Noire, Utopia Opera, the long-running Bronx Opera, and the semi-resurrected New York City Opera—play a crucial role. They supply cheap seats for curious newcomers, opportunities for young performers, and a theatrical intimacy that can’t be found at the Met. At their best, they give you the feeling of looking at opera from the inside.

Usually, the repertory of the D.I.Y. troupes tends toward the Baroque, bel canto, and twentieth-century chamber opera. In early March, LoftOpera attempted “Tosca,” the kind of big-boned late-Romantic work that more or less requires a large orchestra. In some ways, the experiment fell short. An ensemble of thirty-two musicians, led by Dean Buck, conveyed much of the atmosphere and the nuance of the first act but came under strain in the second. The heroine’s ceremony around Scarpia’s corpse—the arrangement of the candles and the rest—was undercut by sketchy string intonation, and the frigid final chords of E minor and F-sharp minor, which should incite a shiver, merely wheezed.

I was riveted all the same. Loft mounted “Tosca” in a former bus-repair facility in Bushwick—one of several Brooklyn venues that the company has commandeered since its founding, in 2013. Raymond Zilberberg, the director, moved the action to a contemporary setting: Eleni Calenos, the Tosca, sashayed in a sun hat and sunglasses; James Chamberlain, the Cavaradossi, wore a T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans; Gustavo Feulien, the Scarpia, prowled about in a leather jacket. We seemed to be in a half-gentrified underworld where bohemians rubbed shoulders with sadist police. The audience sat on two sides of the space, a few feet from the action. Even if you lost the sensation of voices conquering a large auditorium, you still registered their inborn force. There was no need for the performers to turn toward the crowd: they sang and acted face to face. This visceral realism was most telling during Scarpia’s attempted rape of Tosca: the writhing bodies were as difficult to watch as on some grim cable-TV drama.

Calenos, a young Greek-born soprano, had the best outing. Secure in pitch, rich in expressive detail, knifelike at the climaxes, she seemed ready for a much bigger stage. The male leads turned in credible, committed performances, although Chamberlain sagged below pitch at times and Feulien needed more sonorous menace in his lower range. The orchestra was the real problem: Puccini’s lustrous instrumentation went missing for much of the evening. Loft is probably better suited to smaller-scale pieces, although the bravura energy of this raw, brutal “Tosca” was something to behold.

Heartbeat Opera is an even newer arrival, having sprung up in 2014. Its leaders—the directors Louisa Proske, Ethan Heard, and Jennifer Newman, the composer-pianist Daniel Schlosberg, and the violinist-conductor Jacob Ashworth—are recent graduates of the drama and music programs at Yale. While Loft was presenting “Tosca,” Heartbeat took over the Theatre at St. Clement’s, on West Forty-sixth Street, with a double bill of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “Dido and Aeneas.” This was a more radical endeavor—less pint-sized grand opera than an appropriation of the genre for theatre of the black-box type.

Schlosberg has edited and arranged “Lucia” as a one-act, ninety-minute piece, employing six soloists and a quintet of clarinet, cello, piano, guitar, and percussion. In Proske’s conception, the heroine is mad from the outset, the story unfolding as an extended hallucination in a hospital ward. Schlosberg’s scoring—whistling tones of bowed vibraphone and cymbals, the harplike sound of strummed piano strings, the slide of a shot glass on an electric guitar—put a modernist frame around the action, although the substance of Donizetti’s score came through. Jamilyn Manning-White was an agile, fiery Lucia.

Heard’s staging of “Dido” was lighter and daffier in tone, despite the tragic ending. A cocktail party degenerates into surreal anarchy, with witches prancing about and the lovers copulating in a bathtub. Carla Jablonski’s poised account of Dido was a bit too detached, but the dynamic young baritone John Taylor Ward—portraying Aeneas, a witch, and several subsidiary characters—threw himself into the proceedings with stylish abandon. Ashworth, leading from his violin, elicited a performance that was elegant, boisterous, and melancholy by turns. And the scale of the show felt exactly right; after all, “Dido” seems to have had its première not at an opera house but at a girls’ boarding school in London.

The crushing greatness of Bach’s two extant Passion settings, which invariably make multiple appearances in the weeks before Easter, has often discouraged latter-day composers from treading the same ground. One who dared was the Swiss master Frank Martin, whose oratorio “Golgotha” had its première in 1949. The work has received several fine recordings, notably a version on Harmonia Mundi, but until this year it had had only one live performance in New York. At Trinity Wall Street recently, the New Amsterdam Singers, an amateur chorus under the direction of Clara Longstreth, presented an intrepid revival of “Golgotha,” with the baritone Tyler Duncan impeccable in the role of Jesus. Outwardly austere, seething with inner drama, this is the only modern Passion that breathes the same air as Bach’s, and its neglect defies comprehension. ♦