Opening night of “Così Fan Tutte” at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

It was an artistic collaboration delayed by some 25 years: The London architect Zaha Hadid responded as much to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles as she did to “Così Fan Tutte” when she designed her undulating all-white set for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of Mozart’s opera this week (it closes on Saturday). “We were responding to the context, to Frank’s design,” Ms. Hadid said in a telephone interview from London.

Mr. Gehry’s hall, with its swooping curves and billowing volumes constructed in warm woods, is a hard and very complex act to follow. But Ms. Hadid, who is herself often described in operatic terms as a diva, effectively invited Mr. Gehry into a duet by extending the curves of his stormy interior onto the stage in back of the orchestra.

With paths rising, falling and turning between cresting waves, her oceanic set integrates itself within a hall originally inspired by sailing. But the forms and spaces of Ms. Hadid’s design are even more liquid than Mr. Gehry’s, a result of the computer’s ever more proactive role today in architecture offices. In a time-lapse snapshot of contemporary architectural history, the two designs graphically illustrate where the avant-garde has been and where it is going.

As if making the point about updating Mr. Gehry’s hall, Ms. Hadid designed the set so that the waves in this tale of nautical comings and goings actually swell at the push of a button. If architecture has been called “frozen music,” she has defrosted it. The feat, made possible by computer-driven hydraulic mechanisms in the floor, with the waves made of stretch fabric, is not a gratuitous display of architectural virtuosity. Instead it supports the heaving emotions of the sopranos and tenors on stage.

“It’s an emotional landscape,” says Saffet Bekiroglu, the project architect, who happens to have worked for Mr. Gehry in Los Angeles before moving on to Ms. Hadid’s London office several years ago. “As in the plot, where the two sisters are being manipulated without their knowledge, there are forces operating beneath the surface of what you see.”

Opera audiences usually look at scenography built on a proscenium stage as though through a picture window. Designed for concerts rather than operas, the 360-degree stage of Disney Hall is instead surrounded by seating. Performers sing in a space that they share with the audience. No “fourth wall” separates them.

Ms. Hadid’s design takes full advantage of being liberated from what has been called the missionary position by creating an omnidirectional set whose floor plan sends the singers in a circular motion that leads them to the perimeter of the stage as well as to its center. They sing to one another across the set in every direction. Factoring the full width, depth and altitude of the stage into the performance heightens the stereophonic impact of the opera, since the sound no longer appears to originate at the small end of a spatial megaphone. The set acts like a Mobius strip that choreographs the singers up, around and through the topography. They do not stand planted and immobilized. As Ms. Hadid intended, the design gives the 18th-century opera a dynamic new dimension.

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