This is not the formal Baroque “The Fairy Queen” of last year’s Astoria Music Festival. It’s not the madcap Mozart of “Don Giovanni” or “The Marriage of Figaro.” Even the passion of “Carmen” doesn’t come close.

This is “Wozzeck.” It’s the biggest, most complex, most expensive production the Festival has ever staged.

And it’s modern opera.

AMF?Board President Leena Riker is in full multi-tasking mode this week, coordinating the daily Festival performances while preparing for the immense production of “Wozzeck” this weekend.

“We’ve never done such an elaborate production,” she said. “We’re really going all-out in producing this in a more complicated, produced way.”

This will be the Pacific Northwest premiere of “Wozzeck”?(pronounced Vot-zeck), which was composed by Austrian Alban Berg and made its debut in Berlin in 1925. Based on a dramatic piece by Georg Büchner, the opera tells “the dramatic story of a poverty-stricken soldier, oppressed by his superiors, experimented upon by a nutty doctor, betrayed by his common-law wife, mocked by her seducer, and driven to madness and murder,” according to AMF?program notes.

Riker compares the music of Berg to that of his Expressionist contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler. “(Artistic Director)?Keith Clark has said that conducting most operas is very easy,” she explained. “This one is not easy. It’s very complicated from a conductor’s perspective. It varies a lot.”

The cast is composed of established soloists who regularly perform all over the world, Riker said. Though they will sing in German, the English text will be projected as part of a simultaneously-shown film, making the production a multimedia experience.

San Francisco’s Ensemble Parallèle is collaborating with the Astoria Music Festival on “Wozzeck,” providing technical crew, sets and costumes.

“We have had two stage directors here all week,” Riker said, preparing the Liberty Theater for the opera’s performances. Some set pieces weigh in at one solid ton, so the Liberty’s stage has been reinforced to support their weight.

“Everything else we’ve ever done has been sort of ‘semi-staged,'” Riker noted. “This is close to fully staged … It’s massive, it’s very elaborate – and very risky.”

Because of the expense involved in bringing “Wozzeck” to the AMF?stage, Festival staff applied for six grants – and received every one of them.

“It’s such a big effort that we had to do something different than we had ever done to raise money,” Riker said. The biggest contribution came from a grant from the James F. and Marian L. Miller Foundation specifically for the production of “Wozzeck,” which was matched by an individual donor, Jeannine Cowles. “Without that, we could not have done this,” Riker said.