David McVicar's Semele in Paris: the hottest director of his generation in the U.K. brings Handel's sex comedy to Theatre des Champs-Elysees this month.(Hot Ticket)(Brief Article)

In David McVicar's work, there's a strong flavor of opera as living theater that never goes out of its way to shock but can take in the shocking. His Covent Garden Rigoletto, for example, opened with a party scene that included nudity and graphic displays of sexuality, not added in gratuitously but a depiction of the anything-goes morality of the Duke's court. His Glyndebourne Boheme presented here-and-now kids whose pastimes included cocaine as well as failing relationships, but such touches of gritty modernity never compromised the integrity of his overall view of one of opera's most durable romances.

Though he's hard to pigeonhole, McVicar is a searching, text-based director, whose detailed handling of the recitatives in his Opera North Don Giovanni was as masterly as his vision of the Enlightenment, presented in Covent Garden's Zauberflote, was satisfying.

The thirty-seven-year-old Scot, who has now worked with all of Britain's major companies, has ...