Student productions are tricky to review. If they’re good, the reviewer can sound condescending ("Excellent for a student production"); if they’re not, the reviewer can sound mean. But shouldn’t our local-music-conservatory productions be held to the highest standard, especially since the students often produce better work than the professionals? A little over a year ago, the Boston Conservatory had a brilliant production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide that hadn’t a trace of amateurism. This season, it put on an even more challenging work, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, and one of the "amateurs" was first time stage director Sanford Sylvan, Boston Conservatory’s new head of opera studies and the beloved baritone who created the role of Chou En-lai in Peter Sellars’s production of another minimalist opera, John Adams’s Nixon in China. Sylvan has also done profound work with Sellars in Handel and Mozart and has performed numerous recitals and Bach Passions. Many of his distinguished and celebrated musical colleagues peppered the sold-out crowd.

Akhnaten has built-in challenges for even the most experienced director. Long and musically repetitious (I’ve come to like it less with each rehearing), it also has a minimal scenario: a Pharaoh’s funeral, a coronation, a love duet, an execution. The staging has to be extremely inventive to keep us attentive while the music — some of it gorgeous, some of it merely monotonous — keeps chugging away. But Sylvan’s production tended to be static — hieratic and relentlessly symmetrical — and rather dated in its circa 1960s abstractness, with the chorus, singing from scores, planted squarely on risers. Five years ago, I was mildly irritated by Mary Zimmerman’s theatrical game playing when she staged it for Boston Lyric Opera, but now I missed some of her flashy-if-derivative devices. Sylvan’s innate musicality was his major asset. Akhnaten might work better in concert, where one can supply one’s own images — though it’s an opportunity for truly inspired and skillful directors and designers.

One central problem for a Glass director is how to get the characters to move comfortably to the endless rhythmic repetitions. Sylvan’s student singers needed to be taught that simply walking slowly around a stage doesn’t work unless that movement has a definite style, or at least the appearance of intention. When characters exit, they should seem to be going somewhere other than just "off stage." This is daunting work for even the most experienced stage director.

Akhnaten is nothing if not portentous — more of it is sung in Hebrew, Egyptian, archaic Akkadian, and wordless vowels than in English. (I could swear the chorus was singing "Enron, Enron, Enron, Enron"; then Glass’s doorbell chimes made me think: "Avon, Avon, Avon.") Any production needs some injection of visual wit, some element of resistance to the heaviness. The playfulness Sylvan asked of Akhnaten’s six daughters, who make toys out of the old symbols abandoned by Akhnaten’s monotheism, was a step in the right direction, but the girls seemed more like suburban American teenagers than Egyptian princesses. (And Stacey Stephens’s unflattering costume-shop draperies made everyone look 20 pounds heavier.) The ritual throat slitting seemed completely phony. I hope Sylvan takes another shot at directing — but maybe with something that makes fewer technical and imaginative demands on a novice.

The highlight my night was the vocal power and elegance of graduate-student countertenor Jonas Laughlin. Glass’s rhythms make diction an uphill battle, and Laughlin didn’t get very far up that incline, especially in Akhnaten’s "Hymn to the Sun," which is in English. Kala Maxym (Nefertiti), Amy Lawrence (Queen Tye), Ovidio Esquivel (the High Priest), and Jamian Coleman (Horemhab) were also impressive. So was the chorus. The high point in the production — as it is in the score — was the exquisite and (in Sylvan’s staging) sexy love duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti, with soaring obbligato trumpet (Natalie Hughes). The only inadequate performance was by the Scribe, who raced through the spoken narration with flat inflection and unhelpful phrasing; speaking pompous English isn’t necessarily easier than singing it. Conductor Beatrice Jona Affron, who also led the BLO production, kept the small student orchestra (no violins) alert but not strictly together or in tune. Some of the music sounds like a Cecil B. DeMille soundtrack, some of it like Carmina Burana. One of the few musical phrases that actually resembles a tune is a ripoff of the 1920 standard "Whispering" ("Whispering when you cuddle near me"). To work, it needs a tonal glamor and finesse these students don’t yet have.