Of course, Death always survives. Mr. Adès personifies him in a baritone (here, the malevolent Mark Stone, replacing Simon Keenlyside, who withdrew because of illness) and has him sing with a mezzo-soprano (Christianne Stotijn, in magnificent voice) who represents humanity in all its variety. With that basic framework, Mr. Adès takes some of the characters from the Lübeck frieze and weaves a tapestry of 15 portraits.

All the souls are linked by a common fate, but each is wonderfully distinct. A cardinal, for instance, is introduced by a disturbed hymn tune in the flutes; the King gets a rumbling fanfare on the low brass, as if from hell; and the Knight struts in armor evoked by anvils. Frenzied dance rhythms underpin everything, recalling the trippy, influential “Ecstasio” from “Asyla.”

Mr. Adès makes his sympathies clear. The bourgeois — a doctor, a merchant, a usurer — are his main target, their music rootless, full of inane little scales that crescendo to deafening, unconducted carnage that implodes into deserved nothingness. But when Death must woo the Maiden, the composer conjures an alluring dreamscape of harps, strings and vibraphones. More tender still is the Straussian duet Mr. Adès reserves for Death and the Child, who dance in a spectral lullaby.

With “Totentanz,” Mr. Adès is pictorial but always primarily musical in his effects, deploying an enormous percussion section that whistles and rattles, ratchets and whips, even clatters with the sound of bones (wood blocks here, but the score allows for animal bones, too). Like many of his pieces, this one extends the mischievous logic of Berlioz and has a flashy sound world that bridges neo-Romanticism and modernism.

And while Mr. Adès’s sound is now completely his own, for “Totentanz” he seems to summon a communion of composers past. The ascetic Monk, for instance, is sent away with the music of high society, a soured Johann Strauss waltz. The Peasant is called by a little horn motif, a classic trait of German Romanticism. Even the Child dies to strains that recall Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” before the reaper clacks off into the distance, Death and humanity chanting “tanzen” (“to dance”), on the search for more victims.