And Berlioz is a conductor's delight.  Old Weingartner and Toscanini and Monteux loved his music, and in our own day he has found first-rate exponents in Muti, Levine, and now (new to me in this repertoire) also James Conlon.  (You'll ask: Where's Colin Davis?  But something in me as a listener has never warmed to Davis in this or other repertoire, although he has certainly been one of the most dedicated Berliozians of our time.)  This season, Conlon has taken over the Met's production of La Damnation de Faust, which Levine conducted when it was new last year, and he has brought to the score incisiveness and lyricism similar in concept to Levine's yet all his own.  Robert Lepage's video-based production made the same impression on me this year as last: it contains much that is beautiful and fascinating but also much that is over the top - effect for effect's sake.  But it feels familiar this year, and familiarity breeds... well, acceptance, in this case.

The cast was new.  Ramón Vargas (Faust) may not have Marcello Giordani's dramatic presence, but he also doesn't have Giordani's constricted, strained sound in the middle-high register, which is where a lot of the part (and a lot of French tenor writing in general) lies.  Olga Borodina is a fine Marguerite, but following in Susan Graham's footsteps is an ungrateful task.  Ildar Abdrazakov is somewhat less dashing as Mephistopheles than was John Relyea, but the two are equals with respect to vocal and communicative power.  The all-important orchestra and chorus (after all, Berlioz conceived this work as an oratorio-like, four-part "dramatic legend", not as an opera) were simply magnificent, this year as last.  I'm hoping to go back for another performance, and I hope, too, that we won't have to wait many seasons before this this production returns to the Met's repertoire.

In thinking about the Met's singers in this work, I suddenly remembered Régine Crespin's comment to me - at the end of Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition in Bordeaux in 1996 - about the poor showing that young French singers had made in the previous days; the great French soprano attributed this outcome to bad voice teaching in her country's conservatories.  I'm not in a position to judge the validity of her statement, and certainly there have always been some remarkable French singers.  But it's true that the opera world could use a number of first-rate native French-speaking singers well versed in their country's repertoire.  French is the most difficult "opera language" for non-natives to deal with.  Italian- and Spanish-speaking singers have a particularly hard time of it because they're not accustomed to dealing with massive quanitites of diphthongs; a case in point is the wonderful Mirella Freni, who used to sing quite a bit of French repertoire beautifully but who rarely, in my experience, managed to pronounce correctly the short French e sound (as in the article le), which is present, I'd guess, in about a third of all French words.  Germans, Russians, Brits, and Americans may have a slight advantage, but they don't seem to manage much better than their Latinate colleagues.  None of the principals in this year's Damnation de Faust cast made the text intelligible even 30 or 40 percent of the time - and I found Renée Fleming's French diction just as mediocre in her otherwise remarkable performance of Messiaen's extremely difficult Chansons pour Mi at the New York Philharmonic's opening night concert, part of which I saw and heard on television.

I recall Domingo's story of a performance of La traviata in which he took part in Tel Aviv at the beginning of his career: he sang Alfredo in Italian, the Violetta did her part in German, the baritone performed his in Hungarian, and the chorus sang in Hebrew.  The performance must have been both barbarous and hilarious, but presumably each singer's pronunciation was clear.  Having multinational casts sing in languages that they can't pronounce properly presents an apparently insurmountable difficulty.

The program consisted of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony and the Bruckner Second.  In the past, Muti's Mozart often seemed forced to me - carefully conceived but with tempi, both fast and slow, that didn't seem to flow naturally.  This was not the case here: the approach was fresh, playful, and thoroughly delightful.  And for the second time in my listening life, I did not either fall asleep or wish I had fallen asleep during a Bruckner symphony.  The first was a New York Philharmonic performance of the Sixth a couple of years ago, also conducted by Muti.  I have a feeling that his success with this composer has to do with the fact that instead of trying, as many of his colleagues do, to rationalize the unrationalizable by shoehorning all those weird, contrasting episodes into a logical whole, he focuses on each episode and lets it flower.  Maybe he reached the conclusion that thematic dithering is central to Bruckner's compositional process - at least in the symphonies; much less so in the religious music - and that the works' coherence is to be found precisely in their apparently incoherent qualities.  Now that I'm well into my seventh decade, I think it's safe for me to say that I'll never be a Brucknerian, but I can finally see that a good Bruckner performance every once in a while can be a pleasant experience.  The CSO sounded splendid, and the city's pre-honeymoon with Muti, who takes over as music director next fall, seems to be in full swing.

Call me crazy, but on Saturday evening I thought again (if only for a moment) of Bruckner's bizarrely episodic Second Symphony while listening to the excellent Pacifica Quartet play Janáček's even more episodic "Intimate Letters" Quartet at the Metropolitan Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.  I sometimes have the feeling that Bruckner is episodic because he couldn't figure out what else to do, whereas Janáček is episodic, especially in this work, because that's what his churning stomach was dictating to him.  This quartet is full of Eros and Thanatos - hardly a unique combination (these are the magnetic poles between which most art bounces back and forth, though there certainly isn't a hell of a lot of Eros in Bruckner) - but in this case the emotions created by those two demanding gods are mashed together with Slavic exuberance and good old early-20th-century, Central European angst.  The Pacifica threw themselves into the maelstrom and captured the piece's wild mood shifts wonderfully well.

I was much less impressed by their take on Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet (C Major, K. 465): I felt that the first movement's introductory Adagio was exaggerated, not so much by the ultra-slow tempo as by inflated dyanmics and phrasing that went with it, and the Allegro itself seemed unsteady, as if the musicians had inadvertently taken a marginally faster tempo than usual.  The Andante cantabile was marred by numerous little affectations that so many musicians today opt for in Mozart; I generally find that "bringing out" details is a much less successful procedure than letting them stand out by making sure that everything around them is absolutely clear but subordinate. The third movement and finale were much less fussy.  Maybe some of the problems in the first two were exacerbated by the auditorium's slightly dry acoustics, which have a negative effect on Mozart's super-exposed musical textures.

The Pacifica Four's Brahms, however, was every bit as good as their Janáček.  The Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2, seems to me the most difficult to bring off among the composer's three surviving works in this genre.  With the exception ot its relatively forthright finale, the piece has an underlying terrain that shifts constantly with respect to rhythm, articulation, harmonic movement, and emotional content.  The musicians captured all of this excellently; even the gently anguished piano dolce chords in bars 20 and 22 - a stumbling block for so many ensembles - came off with just the right degree of internal tension.  Another stumbling block is the choice of a basic tempo for the second movement: if it's a shade too fast, the sense of repose is destroyed, but if it's a shade too slow, the opening theme sounds banal. The Pacifica players got it right - and they also understood that the violence in the movement's agitated middle section must sound semi-repressed; there's a reason, after all, why Brahms's dynamic markings never rise above a single forte.  Even the cello's dark upbeat to the third movement - usually dragged out to make it more "meaningful" - was all the more portentous for its gentleness.  And the first violin's headlong, virtuosic dash in the finale's coda capped a wholly satisfying performance.

I don't think that the profoundly intimate cavatina from another A minor quartet - Beethoven's Op. 132 - makes an appropriate encore piece, but I'm glad that I stayed to hear it because it was so well played.  I look forward to hearing this fine group in other Beethoven quartets as well as other repertoire.

I had been told, or had read somewhere, that it was Samuel Johnson who said something like, "What is too foolish to be spoken is sung."  But in re-reading Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville for my History of Opera course at the Curtis Institute (several of my students will be participating, this winter, in an in-house production of Rossini's Barbiere), I find Figaro himself saying, "ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante" (what isn't worth saying is sung).  If I'm not mistaken, however, Dr. Johnson also said that what is too profound to be spoken is sung.  In any case, although Rossini's Barbiere has plenty of touching moments and is certainly not foolish, it was not meant to be profound.  Or can we say that effervescent wittiness contains a sort of reflected (as opposed to reflective) profundity?  It is profound by association: it uses irony and ridicule, rather than high drama and reason, to comment on human foibles; it does not describe or explain those foibles - it smacks us in the head with them.  For that matter, even farce, by its very obviousness, can be probing and corrosive, because even a distorting mirror is still a mirror.

Bartlett Sher's Met production of Barbiere is exuberantly farcical.  I may be misremembering, but it seemed to me even more over the top this year than when it premiered two seasons ago.  Yet like Mozart's Figaro, Barbiere allows for elastic interpretation, and there is a lightness to this production  - its sets as well as its action - that makes one excuse its excesses.  Conductor Maurizio Benini is a competent baton-wielder who accommodates singers rather than trying to provide them with some sort of common musical vision or sense of direction, and as far as I could determine he seemed to let each of them ornament their parts a piacere.  But Joyce DiDonato is a scintillating Rosina, vocally and stage-wise, and all of the other singers ranged from acceptable (Barry Banks as Lindoro/Almaviva, has a vibrato that makes individual notes in fast passages almost unintelligible) to very good (the Russian Rodion Pogossov, as Figaro, trained at the Met's Lindemann Young Artists Development Program).

I understand that conductor Daniele Gatti was booed at the first performance of this year's Aida revival, but I don't know why.  At the third performance, which I heard, the orchestra played well under his baton, and he seemed to have a good, solid concept of the work.  His tempi made sense, the ensemble scenes functioned well - so what was all the fuss about?  No one protested against Ettinger or Benini, and Gatti is several cuts above them both.  The singing, on the other hand, was somewhat uneven.  Violeta Urmana is fine in the title role, but her voice doesn't soar in high and/or intense passages, as Caballé's and Leontyne Price's used to do, and at the performance I attended she had trouble holding some climactic high notes for a reasonable length.  Johan Botha is an old-fashioned stand-and-sing tenor; his Radames was clear-voiced and true in intonation, but it communicated little emotion.  Sure, if you read the plot or even the whole libretto, you think that Radames and Aida are two-dimensional characters, but with a little help from their interpreters they should make us want to care about them.  Carlo Guelfi, the Amonasro, is not a great singer, but he has exactly the right sort of Italianate sound for this and related roles. Dolora Zajick (Amneris) has one of the most powerful voices in the business today, but subtlety is not her forte.  (I'm tempted to say that her forte is forte, but I've heard her do better than she did in this performance.)  Ramfis - one of several Verdi characters through whom the composer expressed his dislike of religion in general and the clergy in particular - was stiffly portrayed by Roberto Scandiuzzi, who, in solo passages, was often out of sync with the orchestra: sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow.  (This reminds me of the comment of a disgruntled symphony conductor who found himself working with a not terribly exalted ballet ensemble:  "Dancers perform in two different tempi," he said; "too fast and too slow.")  Donald Palumbo's chorus sang magnificently, as it almost always does, and Sonja Frisell's monumental, twenty-year-old production still functions well.

Just now I'm remembering one of the latter moments.  While I was visiting my girlfriend at the University of Michigan 45 years ago -- I was eighteen at the time -- we went to see The Music Room, a film by Satyajit Ray.  I had never before heard Indian classical music, and I was amazed and fascinated by its combination of intellectual complexity and sensual intensity.  If I hadn't been so occupied and preoccupied with Western music, literature, and art, I could easily have taken a turn into Indian culture right then and there.  I'm not a fundamentally lazy person, but I am a fundamentally all-or-nothing person, and this characteristic leads to laziness with respect to whatever doesn't interest me totally.

I've written the previous paragraphs only to explain (without attempting to excuse myself) why I know so little about Indian music despite the fact that every time I come into contact with it, it mesmerizes me.  And this very fact surprises me, because I'm not easily mesmerized.  Long-winded late and post-romantic works in the Western musical canon, for instance, rarely mesmerize me, nor does the music of composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass, et al., much of which depends on some sort of capacity to be mesmerized.

I went to 89-year-old Ravi Shankar's Carnegie Hall concert yesterday evening, asking myself en route why I was going -- especially when a subway screw-up made the trip longer and more complicated than usual.  During the concert itself, there was too much amplification in the hall, and some boors in the audience kept taking flash photos, despite a pre-concert announcement that this was not allowed.  Yet I felt very, very happy to be there.  I freely admit that just as people who don't know much about the internal workings, origins, and various performing traditions of Western classical music may derive uncritical enjoyment from concerts that I find appalling, it's quite possible that what I heard last night would not have appealed at all to people in the know.  All I can say is that the music's rising, falling, and orgasmically explosive re-rising, its constant changes of meter and pace, its stupefying rhythms (the tabla player Tanmoy Bose was wonderful), and its vast emotional range delighted me as they always do.  I heard, or thought I heard, more pain and anger but also more unrestrained joyousness in the playing of the old man -- who can no longer even tune his own sitar (whether for lack of strength or loss of fine hearing I don't know) -- than in that of his 28-year-old daughter Anoushka, who nevertheless seemed to me to play beautifully on an instrument that had a much longer neck (thus a wider range) than her father's.

I repeat: I was happy, truly happy, to be enjoying the complex rhythms and melodies and the Dionysian impulse of this foreign but to me wholly attractive music.

Then there was the Met's controversial new Tosca production.  Starting a season with a repertoire opera is hardly a bold act - and the Met has presented Tosca some 900 times.  But this year - as practically everyone interested in opera knows by now - Peter Gelb dared to mothball Franco Zeffirelli's grandiose 1985 production (back then, one of the original participants said to me, "I'd like to take you up on stage: you feel as if you're standing in the middle of a f---ing football field!") and to call on the Swiss stage director Luc Bondy and the French set designer Richard Peduzzi to create something new.  As is now well known, the production team was roundly booed on opening night.  I attended the third performance, and I found it hard to understand what all the fuss was about.  Yes, the second-act set is decidedly ugly, and I felt that Bondy was uncertain in his approach to the action in the act's dénouement.  But take it from someone who lived in Italy for 23 years: the cold feeling of entering a huge, unilluminated Baroque church early in the morning was well captured through the first act's dark set, just as the pre-dawn rooftop setting of the last act served its purpose.  Bondy and Peduzzi did not toy with the plot's time and place.  I attended the third performance, for which James Levine was replaced by Joseph Colaneri, who did a creditable job, and at which Carlo Guelfi - growling too often but otherwise singing well - took over for two indisposed Scarpias.  Karita Mattila threw herself into the title role with characteristic intensity and conviction; she is not a natural in Italian opera, but she certainly acquitted herself better here than in last year's Manon Lescaut - just as Marcelo Alvarez was much better as Cavaradossi than as Manrico in last season's Trovatore.  In short, this observer had expected to leave the theater in anger or disgust but ended up rather enjoying the evening.

James Levine's absence for emergency back surgery also put a damper on Carnegie Hall's opening night concert by the Boston Symphony, but after five seasons under his direction the orchestra is sounding splendid.  Daniele Gatti managed to learn John Williams's brand-new harp concerto, On Willows and Birches (a pretty but inconsequential piece, to my ears and mind), in a few hours and seemed to do a fine job of backing up the excellent soloist, Ann Hobson Pilot.  And he was similarly at one with Evgeny Kissin in Chopin's F minor Piano Concerto, which is not technically hard but is often very tricky (especially in the second movement) for orchestra and conductor.  It is technically difficult for the pianist, however, yet Kissin played it with extraordinary lightness and brilliance.  In Beethoven's Coriolan Overture, Gatti seemed to be trying to make a purely dramatic, almost operatic, piece into an epic one, and his approach to La Mer - the concert's finale - was noteworthy more for its crystalline, Boulezian clarity than for the sort of physical excitement that you can hear in recordings by most of the old-time conductors and quite a few contemporary ones.  But he really saved the BSO and Carnegie from what could have been a completely deflated and deflating evening.   I am curious to hear (next week) how he is dealing with Aida at the Met.

And so to Avery Fisher Hall.  I was out of town on the New York Philharmonic's opening night, but I attended Alan Gilbert's concerts on September 26th and October 3rd.  I have high hopes for this serious, dedicated musician and for the orchestra that has been entrusted to him.  Their performance of Schoenberg's lush Pelleas und Melisande was intense and committed, and their approach to Ives's Second Symphony seemed equally convinced.  But not convincing - at least not to this listener, who finds this work boring in its best moments, crude and downright silly in all the others.  And don't tell me that I'm missing the point of Ives's iconoclastic irony!  One can hear that, in proportion, in Three Places in New England and some other Ives works, but what we have in this case is 35 minutes'-worth of overblown nonsense.  Sure, there is some real feeling here and there, but it's overwhelmed by a lot of tenth-rate Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Berlioz (the pomp of his religious music without its substance), Bruckner, Schumann, Elgar, and Stephen Foster, along with a mixture of hymns and patriotic tunes that are amusing at first but that quickly wear thin - very thin.  At the first of the two concerts, I found Frank Peter Zimmermann's approach to the Brahms Violin Concerto angular, gritty-sounding, and unmoving, but at the second Emanuel Ax's concept and realization of the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto were entirely to my taste - and Gilbert and the Philharmonic were his ideally matched partners for him.

At both concerts, Gilbert spoke to the audience - at the first, about the Schoenberg work, and at the second, about Expo, a new piece by Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic's composer-in-residence, who joined in the conversation.  (Expo sounded to me like a skillfully-written experiment in timbres - an otherwise empty genre of which most of the listeners I know, including many radicals, have become profoundly tired.).  Gilbert knows his stuff speaks well and warmly, without either condescension or show-off-ish erudition, but I'm of two minds about in-concert - as opposed to pre-concert - chats.  They can be useful, but often the subtext seems to be: "We're about to play something that you won't like or that may bore you unless I clue you in on some of its inner workings."  It may be a good idea, but it shouldn't be implemented too often.

I didn't stay for Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony, which ended the concert. In the first place, I still had last season's brilliant performance of the work, by the Met Orchestra and James Levine, ringing in my ears, and I didn't want to have it dislodged; in the second, I'd had enough of Mr. Nézet-Séguin's jumping around the podium like a jack-in-the-box. Years ago, a celebrated conductor known for his gestural sobriety - in addition to his musical virtues - said to me about a famous colleague known for his podium antics: "Note that after awhile the orchestra stops watching him. The show is too big." I look forward to hearing what Nézet-Séguin will bring to Carmen when he makes his Met debut later this season, and when I'll be able to keep my eyes fixed on the stage action. (Sure, I could have closed my eyes during the concert, but now that I'm in my sixties I find that if I close my eyes I tend to fall asleep.)

All in all, I was much more impressed, a few days later, by the conducting of someone who isn't primarily a conductor than by that of N-S. On Sunday, in another Mostly Mozart concert - this one at Alice Tully Hall - French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard conducted the European Chamber Orchestra in performances of Haydn's "Clock" Symphony, Ligeti's Chamber Concerto, and Mozart's Piano Concerto in F Major, K. 459 (which he conducted from the keyboard). The Haydn was at times lacking in bar-to-bar intensity and playfulness, but it was well worked-out, the tempi felt natural, and there was none of the heavy-handedness that I heard in a Carnegie Hall performance of the same symphony some months ago by Bernard Haitink with the Chicago Symphony. I was not familiar with this relatively early Ligeti work, but Aimard and the thirteen musicians seemed to convey it with mastery and conviction; Aimard's remarks (with brief musical illustrations) immediately before the performance were thoughtful, useful, and concise. Best of all, the Mozart concerto was played and conducted with vitality and subtlety - neither quality at the expense of the other. I wondered why Aimard bothers collaborating with the unmusical Nikolaus Harnoncourt, since he gets much better results on his own. If you rate conductors by their ability to help groups of fellow-musicians achieve excellent musical results, Aimard appears to be a damned good one.

Now, regarding Tony Tommasini's article, "Can You Love the Creation, Not the Creator?", in this past Sunday's Times: I agree that Wagner wrote some of the most significant music in the history of the art, and that trying to ignore that music is ridiculous. I'm no Wagnerite - I find sitting through an entire Wagner opera extremely trying - but I love a lot of the music in almost every one of his operas. My problem with Wagner (and of course it is my problem, not his) springs from my feeling that he needed a good editor - someone who would have told him, "Dick, putting that idea across two or three times is more than sufficient; if you do it thirty-one times, you're telling listeners that they're idiots who can't be trusted to remember what you said five minutes ago. Here, have a look at this Mozart string quartet....." On the other hand, whether or not one is a Wagnerite, Wagner's music exists; those who try to prevent it from being performed remind me of the US State Department during the decades when it tried to pretend that Communist China - the most populous nation on earth - did not exist, and that if they ignored it long enough it would go away.

As to the vexata quaestio of Wagner's anti-Semitism: the issue isn't that the Nazis liked his music (who cares what they liked?) but that he espoused - over and over again, in print and at numbing length - a lot of ideas that the Nazis later adopted; Hitler even claimed Wagner as his sole philosophical forebear. Wagner's anti-Semitism wasn't limited to an occasional racial slur of the sort that many people make from time to time about one group or another ("Those damned [fill in the blank]!"), but rather an ongoing, detailed attack on what he declared to be the pernicious influence of Jews on European civilization. The psychological origins of Wagner's racism have been the object of many studies and are indeed fascinating, but the hard fact is that Wagner would probably have approved of much of what Hitler did, and that many of his descendants were among the Nazis' most fervent supporters. He didn't much like the French, Italians, or most other non-Germans, either, and overall he was a self-serving, dishonest egomaniac; yet the Jews were a particular object of his venom. But is there not poetic justice in the fact that more than a century and a quarter after the composer's death and more than six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, performances of Wagner's music, especially in America, often depend to a considerable extent on the participation of Jewish musicians and the support of Jewish patrons of the arts? I am Jewish, yet I take the deepest pleasure in reading the novels of Dostoyevsky, although I know that he, like Wagner, was an anti-Semitic nationalist of the worst sort; and it seems to me that our willingness to listen to Wagner's music with open ears is our trump card against the hateful, small-minded bigotry of Wagner the man.

I had heard of Michael Jackson, knew that he was an entertainer -- knew, even, that he was odd looking and that he had a sister who had bared a breast, accidentally or otherwise, before the television cameras during some sort of sporting event.  (None of my friends in Europe, where I was living at the time, could understand why this had created a scandal.  "Was her breast ugly?" was the closest any of them, male or female, could come to fathoming the issue.)  What I did not know, however, was that at some point during my long absence from the country this Jackson fellow had replaced Jesus Christ as the primary object of worship for most Americans.

Fortunately, I was traveling in the Midwest from Friday until Tuesday morning, thus I had the incredible privilege of taking in an enormous quantity of television "news" in hotel lobbies and breakfast rooms, in restaurants, and in a few private homes.  My imagination was fired by the rare chance to see how the early prophets of a new religion manipulate the masses.  And on Saturday, when I realized what was about to happen, I began to tremble all over.  I may not be a follower of any religion, but I've studied the religious music of many great composers and can recite the Nicene Creed by heart; and I knew -- yes, I really knew -- what would take place that day: "Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas, / Et ascendit in coelum"....  Thursday-Friday-Saturday.... it was the third day!  The new Savior would be resurrected, according to Scripture, and would ascend to heaven, just as his predecessor had done.

Midnight came and went, in Jerusalem, in LA, and finally at the International Date Line, and nothing happened.  I was horribly disappointed: I admit that I was hoping to see the clergy, who for centuries had been telling everyone about a first resurrection, thrown into disarray by a second one.  But my disappointment was swept away by a new shock.  It seems that millions of Americans were truly surprised to discover that a high-ranking politician -- the governor of a state that, as I recall, opted to fly a Confederate flag over its capitol building only a few years ago -- could be a lying windbag and a hypocrite and could use public funds to go off to Argentina to spend some quality time (is that term still in use, or have I missed the boat again?) with a lover.

These events have made me so ashamed of my ignorance of the society to which I have returned that I am thinking of taking a course in modern American mores, or of reading Mencken for the first time since my teens.  In the meantime, please send substantial contributions to this writer, who is planning the construction, in Manhattan, of the First Church of Michael. ( Look for my postal address in a forthcoming blog entry.)  I'm hoping that the resurrection has merely been deferred.

I'm open-minded about fresh approaches to opera staging, but generally speaking I'm a fan of the Less-Is-More school.  In my opinion, directors who who want to avoid traditional production styles should clear away whatever is inessential and force us audience members to use our imaginations, rather than hitting us on the head or elbowing us in the ribs with their ideas, especially when their ideas are half-baked .  My guess is that people who pay to attend opera performances are unlikely to want to settle for sitcoms, which they can see free of charge on television. Besides, the directors of even the most simple-minded sitcom scripts are capable of creating logical story sequences, whereas some opera stage directors seem to believe that logical thinking is an impediment to creativity.

Let's imagine, for instance, that an opera plot revolves around a young girl in a 19th-century Swiss village -- a young girl who is deeply in love with and about to marry a young guy, but who, one fine morning, wakes up alone in the bed of another guy and can't figure out how she got there.  We in the audience know that she's a sleepwalker, not a streetwalker, but she and her boyfriend and most of the other people in the story are unaware of this fact until near the end, when all is happily resolved.  Now let's imagine that a stage director decides that what this simple tale needs is not, perhaps, some extra charm or mild humor or even a touch of irony, to prod 21st-century audiences into remembering that 200 years ago, girls who were caught sleeping around before marriage were ostracized by society.  No.  What it needs, according to this hypothetical director, is another, more complicated plot set on top of and running simultaneous with the original one!  Why not, for instance, stage the production as a rehearsal of itself in a contemporary rehearsal hall, with the singers who are playing the young girl and boy also pretending to be engaged to each other in real life?  Hey, isn't that a great idea?

Unfortunately, the two stories don't jibe, and the stilted and far from first-rate Italian poetry by Felice Romani to which Vincenzo Bellini set his opera La sonnambula doesn't lend itself to the transposition.  Imagine an actress in our day saying to her real-life adoptive mother, "To you, beloved, tender mother, who preserved me, a little orphan girl, for so happy a day [i.e., preserved my virginity until my marriage], let this sweet weeping and this embrace tell you this, expressed from the heart more than from the brow."  You might as well try to do an updated movie adaptation of The Scarlet Letter with Hester Prynne played as a contemporary Hollywood actress who, however, has to recite Hawthorne's original words.

I'm glad that I heard Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez in the Met's new Sonnambula production -- although they and the other soloists and chorus could have done with somewhat stronger conductorial participation than that of Evelino Pido' --,but if ever there was an opera plot that can't be shoehorned into a modern urban American setting, this is surely it.

Stronger conducting would also have helped the Met's current production of Il trovatore.  The production looks good, and Sondra Radvanovsky is a vocally and theatrically convincing Leonora.  (Dolora Zajick was unable to sing at the performance I attended; the role of Azucena was taken by a cover.)  But I had the impression that Gianandrea Noseda lets everyone do pretty much what s/he wants without giving a lot of thought to integrating the drama's various characters. Dmitri Hvorostovsky wants to sing "Il balen" at an incredibly slow tempo, maybe to show off his remarkable breath control (and it is remarkable)?  Sure, go ahead and make a lovely, lyrical romanza into an inflated piece of pomposity!  Marcelo Alvarez wants to transpose "Di quella pira" downward so that he can pretend to sing a high C that Verdi didn't write in the first place?  Okay, let's not rock the boat -- let him wow the audience to his heart's content.  Someone wants to cut a repeat here or a few bars there, to save maybe five minutes, total, of performing time?  No problem!

Another Italian conductor named Gianandrea -- Gianandrea Gavazzeni (1909-96), who was a highly cultivated gentleman and a great wit -- used to say that Il trovatore is Italy's St. Matthew Passion.  Its illogical plot, in which the four protagonists stubbornly pursue conflicting and ultimately self-destructive aims, may be seen as an allegory for the Italians' apparently eternal and certainly self-destructive factionalism and exaggerated individualism -- whence all the charm and all the exasperation of life in Italy.  By juxtaposing Bach's intense religious masterpiece against Verdi's passionate melodrama, Gavazzeni was slyly juxtaposing the stereotype of Nordic earnestness against the stereotype of irresponsible Mediterranean fatalism.  Of course the comparison works only as a bon mot, but I -- after having lived nearly a quarter-century in Italy -- can tell you that there is a grain of truth in it.

On the issue of concert-hall formality I can testify that when, as a pre-teen, fifty years ago, I first started attending concerts, I found the dressing-up by performers and audience alike ridiculous - particularly the wearing of 19th-century tail coats by male orchestra players, conductors, and soloists - and I still find it ridiculous.  But many people, especially among the subscribers and/or donators to musical organizations, disagree with me: some like the uniformity and believe that miscellaneous clothing would be distracting; others claim that the formality helps to create a sense of occasion.  I'm a music addict (I thirst for good performances of the music I love and stimulating ones of music with which I'm less or not at all familiar), so for me the music creates its own occasion.  But I figure that putting up with the penguin suits and the rituals of stage entries and exits, bows and blown kisses, and polite or enthusiastic applause is a microscopically small price to pay to keep the music going.  Audience members no longer need to wear dresses or jackets and ties to concerts or even to opening nights at the operas, whereas such stuff was de rigueur when I was a youngster; young people and anyone else can come in t-shirts and jeans if they like, so that attire is no longer a valid excuse for not going to musical events.  Yet the fact is that just as I didn't see a lot of other 12-year-olds at concerts when I was 12 or a lot of other 18-year-olds when I was 18, I don't see a lot of 12- and 18-year-olds in attendance today.  Formality, or lack of it, doesn't seem to be a major issue.

I don't agree with Richard Strauss's contention that for people who lack musical training, listening to music is necessarily "a purely sensual, aural feast, unmitigated by any mental activity," and that such listeners are presumptuous to assume that they understand music "better than, for example, Turkish."  Many of a piece's psychological subtleties can be communicated to a person who is sensitive to music and accustomed to a given musical language even if that person is musically illiterate.  Not to mention the fact that being musically literate or even being a professional musician does not automatically guarantee musical sensitivity.  Nevertheless, exposure to fine music, like exposure to fine literature, theater, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc., is effective only when there is some basic receptivity, and the relationship to music can be deepened only through a readiness to pursue what is eternally elusive - to take pleasure in the search itself and in one's evolving but never completely evolved understanding.

Anatole France's hatred of sanctity and sanctimoniousness is mainly respected in Louis Gallet's libretto, but the novelist's brilliant irony -- which, after all, was his most salient characteristic -- is nowhere to be found.  Agreed: communicating irony through music is extraordinarily difficult, but in this case no attempt whatsoever seems to have been made by either Gallet or Massenet; thus the story is automatically condemned to two-dimensionality.

In the punishing title role, Renee Fleming gave one of the finest performances I've ever heard from her, musically and dramatically, despite some shrillness once in awhile, whereas Thomas Hampson, in the less obviously virtuosic but equally tough and important role of Athanael, was dramatically convincing but vocally monochromatic.  Jesus Lopez-Cobos conducted fluently but also rather flaccidly -- and this is an opera in which a bit of rhythmic drive every now and then would be welcome.

The first act and part of the third take place in the Egyptian desert (effectively stylized in this production by John Cox), with a group of religious eremites wearing the sort of ragged tunics that seem to have been de rigueur for fourth-century Christians in the wilderness.  But in the second act we find ourselves in a modern palace in Alexandria, complete with rifle-toting guard; a swanky dressing-gown for Nicias (Thais's lover-of-the-week -- a tenor role, of course), formal evening garb for the guests, and a glittering palm tree that could have been stolen from a Miami Beach hotel lobby.  We chumps in the audience are not supposed to ask why, in a modern Muslim country, folks would be praying to Venus and the other gods of ancient Rome.

But enough of that: it's holiday time!  Concert life has slowed down, even in New York, and the last time I turned on the radio I heard, within a short time-span, "White Christmas" sung by -- if I'm not mistaken -- Bing Crosby, Benjamin Spock, Imogene Coca, T. S. Eliot, Kirsten Flagstad, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Buffalo Bob, Margaret Thatcher, and Leonid Brezhnev.  Better to concentrate on CDs, of which some interesting examples have recently landed on my desk.

I've had many qualms, over the years, about quite a few British early music artists and ensembles, but I was greatly impressed last season by Harry Bicket's conducting of La clemenza di Tito at the Met.  This made me curious to hear his recent recording, with the English Concert on the Virgin Classics label, of Bach sacred arias sung by countertenor David Daniels.  The disc contains excerpts from the Mass in B minor, the St. John and St. Matthew passions, and three cantatas, and the results are excellent and profoundly moving throughout.  These are artists well worth following.

EMI and Sony BMG have been reissuing valuable historic recordings from their vaults; these are in part consolation prizes -- meant, perhaps, to distract us from the realization that the "majors" are making relatively few studio recordings of today's artists -- but in themselves the re-releases are always more than welcome.  From EMI comes a wonderful, seventeen-CD box of recordings by David Oistrakh, the centennial of whose birth passed largely unnoticed this past September.  The great violinist's serious musicianship, technical mastery, beauty of tone, and expressive intensity are all to be heard here, in repertoire that stretches from the Baroque masters to his friends Prokofiev and Shostakovich.  His interpretations of some of the earlier works may sound stylistically old-fashioned today, but the care that he lavished on every detail of every piece and the coherence with which he put those details together are always a great lesson.  One of the reasons why I don't mind being over sixty is that I was able to hear Oistrakh live on many occasions.

I have a close relative who was born the same year (1917) as the remarkable Romanian pianist Dino Lipatti and who is still in excellent physical and mental shape, which makes it all the more difficult for me to absorb the fact that Lipatti, whose reputation and influence have never waned, has been dead for fifty-eight years. Nearly his entire recorded legacy can be heard in EMI's recent seven-CD release of his recordings of Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, Ravel, and Bartok; the quantity is not vast, but the beauty and intensity of the playing have moved and continue to move generations of musicians and listeners.

And speaking of pianists: Sony BMG has reissued, in its "Original Jacket Collection", two ten-CD sets of RCA Victor recordings, one dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein (all Chopin), the other to Vladimir Horowitz (mixed repertoire).  All but one of the Rubinstein CDs contain the well-known recordings that he made between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, when he was in his seventies (the remaining one dates from 1946); the sound is beautiful, the interpretations are often more cautious than what one heard from him in the concert hall during the same period, but they do give a very good idea of the Rubinstein phenomenon.  The Horowitz set is spread over a longer time-span, from 1940, when the pianist was thirty-seven, to 1982, when he was seventy-nine, although there are gaps during the periods in which he was recording for Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon.  I have never been and am not now a Horowitzian, but these CDs demonstrate not only his almost terrifying virtuosity but also his repertorial curiosity: Clementi, Scriabin, Barber, and Kabalevsky are heard alongside the more typical Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, et al.  No Horowitz admirer who does not already own these recordings will want to be without them..

At Zankel two nights later, Alisa Weilerstein offered Golijov's brief Omaramor for solo cello as a virtuosic bonbon amid weightier repertoire, and here the composer's eclecticism was much more subtle -- unobtrusive suggestions of tango, for instance, rather than tango-in-your-face.  The eight-minute miniature worked much better than the eighty-minute opera.

Weilerstein is an outstanding cellist -- thoroughly musical, technically excellent, with a huge dynamic range (the piano was open full-stick but never threatened to overwhelm the cello), and poised and secure in public.  The interpretation that she and the sensitive pianist Inon Barnatan brought to Beethoven's Op. 102 No. 2 provided another example of the Extreme Phrasing and Extreme Dynamics type of approach that I've been grumbling about in previous posts.  Artists who make the listener hear the music's subtleties are rare enough, but the rarest of all are those who let the listener hear the music's subtleties.  This struck me the other day while I was listening to Vladimir Ashkenazy's now vintage recording of Chopin's B minor Sonata: the inner voices in the Largo movement seem simply to exist, in all their quietly erotic beauty, as if by miraculous accident; they don't force us to hear them, yet they're irresistible.  A performance is, among other things, necessarily a commentary on a work, but the best performances are those that don't draw attention to this fact.  When every phrase is piled high with "meaning", the interpreter is putting him/herself in front of the work at hand.  Once again, let me be clear: Weilerstein's and Barnatan's playing was excellent and the interpretation thoughtful; it simply went overboard.

The excess was less evident in the Chopin Cello and Piano Sonata, also beautifully played, but Weilerstein was at her most compelling in Kodaly's horrendously difficult Sonata for Solo Cello, Op. 8 -- one of those works that sound more interesting than they are, when you really think about them, but that nevertheless grip you when they are played with the sort of mastery that this young artist brought to this piece.

Much has been made of Weilerstein's head movements and "inspired" gazes into space, but she is certainly not the only instrumentalist to be so afflicted, or afflicting.  For hundreds of years musicians have debated over whether emotion should be expressed only through the playing or also through physical attitude.  During the Baroque period, the dominant ideal seems to have been sprezzatura (literally "contempt", but more accurately translated, in this case, as "nonchalance"): according to this philosophy, performers should always appear to be playing with ease and not to care about the effect made on the audience.  But Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach believed, on the contrary, that "in languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad;" that "in lively, joyous passages, the executant must again put himself into the appropriate mood;" and that "fitting expressions help the listener to understand our meaning."  I very much favor the sprezzatura school -- I want instrumental music to affect me through my ears, not through my eyes -- but I can always turn my head or close my eyes if the onstage show is too much for me.  Notice, by the way, that the more a conductor emotes and jumps around on a podium, the less the orchestra musicians watch him or her: the proportions are almost mathematical.  Have a look at the old films of Erich Kleiber, Monteux, Mravinsky, Reiner, Toscanini, Walter, and compare them to the films of Bernstein and his emulators, and then tell me which group receives more attention from the orchestra.

Just as impressive as Weilerstein's recital was last Friday's "Musicians from Marlboro" concert at the Metropolitan Museum.  Violinists Miho Saegusa and Jessica Lee, violist Mark Holloway, and cellist Na-Young Baek gave the most powerful and appropriately insane performance of Janacek's "Kreutzer Sonata" String Quartet that I've ever heard, and these four musicians plus violinists Scott St John and Yonah Zur, violist Maiya Papach, and cellist Susan Babini also gave one of the most fleet but intense accounts in my experience of Mendelssohn's youthful Octet.  The interpretation that five of the same players brought to Mozart's Quintet in E-flat, K. 614, wasn't quite as refined and accomplished as their work on the other two pieces, but the whole concert was thoroughly enjoyable -- I left it feeling elated.

The musical event of last week in New York was without a doubt Elliott Carter's one hundredth birthday concert at Carnegie Hall.  To reach that age in good health and with all one's marbles intact is no mean feat in itself; to do so while still in full command of one's creative powers and energies is simply flabbergasting.  And there he was, occupying an aisle seat near the front of the historic auditorium (which was only seventeen years old when he was born), listening to his new, brief, but highly complex piano concerto, Interventions, with Daniel Barenboim as soloist and the Boston Symphony under James Levine.  Afterward, Carter made his way slowly but surely onto the stage to receive the audience's ovation as well as a huge birthday cake from Carnegie's administrators and a rendition of "Happy Birthday" from the orchestra.  Nor were there any concessions to age in the piece itself: from the orchestra's opening, insistent A, opposed immediately by the piano's opening, equally insistent B-flat, the work was full of Sturm und Drang, with little of the lyricism that can be heard, for instance, in some of Carter's other late-period work.  (I'm thinking in particular of the Tempo e Tempi cycle of 1998-99, which was beautifully performed by soprano Susan Narucki with Levine and the Met Chamber Ensemble at Zankel last year.)

In the first half of the concert, which consisted of Schubert's profoundly moving Fantasy in F minor for piano, four hands, and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, Barenboim and Levine seemed ill-matched.  Barenboim emphasized the Fantasy's surface brilliance, whereas Levine seemed more interested in the piece's introverted nature; and in the concerto, Barenboim gave us blocks of details (often interesting ones) while Levine seemed to be struggling to preserve structure.  In any case, the evening's real feature was its conclusion -- one of the most (maybe the most) sweepingly dramatic yet thoroughly detailed performances of The Rite of Spring that I have ever heard.  Yes, there were a few bloopers is some of the solo wind parts, but gimme a break: this was the conclusion of a long evening (the 8 o'clock concert wasn't over until nearly 11) that ended not with a whimper but with a bang -- and what a bang!

Maybe that's a good thing.  Barenboim's performance at Weill was awful.  He played the "primo" piano parts to Levine's "secondo" in the Schubert Grand Duo and in Brahms's Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder Waltzes; the Brahms performance included four vocal soloists from the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.  Levine and the singers -- soprano Lisette Oropesa, mezzo Sasha Cooke, tenor Matthew Plenk, and bass-baritone Shenyang -- seemed to have done their preparatory work well, but Barenboim played haphazardly, crudely "bringing out" the melodic line, forcing the singers to shout but often drowning them out anyway.

This was not the sometimes imprecise but rhapsodic music-making of his mentor Furtwaengler or the occasionally wayward playing of another mentor, Rubinstein; nor was it the result of an "off night" (or afternoon).  This was, simply, ill-prepared, careless, rough-and-ready playing -- an insult to Barenboim's fellow performers and to his audience, which, in this case, included the likes of Susan Graham, Rene Pape, Seiji Ozawa, Eva Wagner, Zarin Mehta, both of Rubinstein's daughters, Ara Guzelimian, and a slew of other people capable of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff.  I was reminded of something an executive with a major American orchestra told me last year: "Daniel can turn out a great performance -- when he gives more than ten percent of his attention to what he's doing."

Beethoven once wrote a criticism of a critic, in the margin of a negative review of his potboiler, Wellington's Victory: "What I shit is better than you thought," he proclaimed.  But that was Beethoven -- who, in any case, was admitting that the piece in question was of less than first-rate quality.  What Barenboim did at the Met Chamber Ensemble concert was being passed off as a respected musician's accomplished work, and it was not that.  I admire his brilliance, facility, and versatility, not to mention his passionate efforts to foster understanding between young Israelis and Palestinians.  But there is a huge price to be paid for spreading oneself too thin, and Barenboim seems to be paying that price.

Oddly enough, the Times, which has always, as far as I can recall, published reviews of the Ensemble's concert series, did not print a review of this concert.  Or did I miss something?

Over at the Met a few days earlier, I heard Levine, his orchestra, the chorus under Donald Palumbo's direction, Susan Graham, (Marguerite) and John Relyea (Mephistopheles) give a marvelous performance of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust.  (I hesitate to criticze Marcello Giordani's performance of the title role because I know how difficult it is, but the truth is that his singing was nearly always strained and his French virtually incomprehensible.)  Trying to make a series of episodes that were intended for the concert hall (Berlioz called the work a "dramatic legend") into an opera is a risky task.  In my opinion, Robert Lepage's multi-media and multi-tiered production succeeded about seventy percent of the time.  Many images -- the vast library, the tavern scene, the trees gradually losing their leaves, the infernal fires -- remain fixed in my memory, but so, unfortunately, do the grotesque blown-up views of Marguerite, the distracting acrobatics of the soldiers walking vertically up the set and then being lowered back down as corpses, the numerous gigantic crucifixes, and other examples of scenographic elephantiasis.  But please, Peter Gelb, bring the whole thing back another year!  The music is so extraordinary, and it was so beautifully and powerfully performed.

Downtown, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage's beautiful Edmond J. Safra Hall, I managed to catch three of the five "Music in Exile" events dedicated mainly to works by composers who had to flee from the Nazis.  The promoters were the MJH itself and Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, and the organizers/performers were the Artists of the Royal Conservatory and their artistic director, Simon Wynberg.  I heard highly interesting, well-played chamber works by Robert Kahn, Matyas Seiber, and Franz Reizenstein, and less interesting but equally well-performed ones by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Walter Arlen, in addition to a talk by Gottfried Wagner -- Richard's rebellious great-grandson -- on the subject of cultural life in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and immediately after the war.  Unfortunately, I had to miss the program dedicated to the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, which, I understand, is well worth getting to know.  Purely by coincidence, shortly after having attended these MJH events I read the recently published (by Weinstein Books) Journal of Helene Berr, expertly translated from the French by David Bellos.  Why this truly remarkable account -- by a young woman who was a wonderful writer at 21 but who died two years later at Bergen-Belsen -- remained unpublished, even in the original, until this year is explained in the book's notes.  The Journal is not just for those of us who are fixated on World War II and the Holocaust: it is, more generally, a tragic work of great depth and beauty by any standards.

Another event dedicated to off-the-beaten-track music was the Juilliard Opera Center's amazingly accomplished production of three one-act operas -- one each by Mussorgsky (The Marriage -- an incomplete work), Ernst Krenek (Heavyweight, or the Pride of the Nation), and Benjamin Fleischmann (Rothschild's Violin).  Krenek, too, was an exile from Nazi Germany, and Fleischmann died at the age of 28 while fighting the Germans during the siege of Leningrad; his opera was completed by Shostakovich.  The playing of these difficult, little-known works, by the Juilliard Orchestra under James Conlon -- prime mover behind this and many related efforts -- put many professional ensembles to shame, and James Marvel's staging as well as the sets, lighting, and video montages by various collaborators were also brought off at the highest professional level.  The singers were excellent, too, particularly the bass-baritone Shenyang, who also participated in the aforementioned Liebeslieder performance at Carnegie/Weill.

Speaking of professional orchestras: although I contribute occasionally to The Gramophone, I don't mind saying that the recent poll of a few music critics that led to a Top 20 list of the world's greatest orchestras seemed to me as childish as "My daddy's stronger than your daddy!" or "Red is prettier than blue."  There should at least have been an accompanying poll that asked the more interesting question, "Which orchestras would you rather hear when they have to fend for themselves under not very good conductors?"  In other words, which orchestras have enough internal discipline and esprit de corps to play at a very high level no matter who is on the podium?  I would guess that the Vienna Philharmonic, which was near the top of The Gramophone's list, would have found itself in a much lower position, and that the Philadelphia Orchestra, which didn't make the list at all, would have been ranked in the Top 10.  But the whole classification notion is ridiculous.

The well-known violinist Renaud Capucon produces some of the most beautiful sounds to be heard from any violinist today; there is a purity to that sound that reminds me of the playing of Arthur Grumiaux.  Capucon appeared with his brother Gautier, a fine cellist, and the pianist Nicholas Angelich, in a recent Metropolitan Museum performance of trios by Haydn (G Major, "Hungarian"), Shostakovich (E minor, Op. 67), and Mendelssohn (C minor, Op. 66).  In my previous entry, I grumbled about the Extreme Dynamics and Extreme Tempi of some artists I'd just heard, and I will now grumble about Extreme Phrasing -- micro-fussiness that shows off performers' attention to detail at the expense of a cumulative effect that never quite comes off.  I hope I'm clear: these were highly accomplished performances by dedicated musicians -- no doubt about it.  But I feel that they need to give as much care to overarching structure as they already give to all the particulars.

Within the last three weeks, two highly accomplished string quartets began their Carnegie/Zankel concerts with Mozart masterpieces: the St. Lawrence opened with the Clarinet Quintet (Todd Palmer was the excellent clarinetist) and the Tetzlaff with the Quartet in D minor, K. 421.  Both performances made me wonder whether I had failed to hear about the discovery of a letter in which Wolfgang told Leopold that his works ought to be played with fussy, precious phrasing, nearly inaudible pianissimos, and crescendos and diminuendos that sound as if they'd been gauged within a thousandth of a decibel (though I don't know how such calculations would have been made in the eighteenth century).  What has happened to the blessedly fleet yet robust Mozart style that seemed to be gaining ground among both traditionalists and "authenticists" in recent decades?  Are we returning to the delicate, porcelain-rococo-statuette Mozart of much earlier times?  More important: are listeners supposed to be thinking, "Wow, listen to how they shaped that three-note motif this time as opposed to the previous time!" or should intensively detailed preparatory work lead to a cumulative impression, rather than obtruding and protruding at every harmonic twist in turn?  Boh.....

Some of the fussiness -- especially the Extreme Dynamics -- continued in the Tetzlaff's performance of Sibelius's "Voces Intimae" Quartet, but it did not mar the group's fine interpretation of gripping Berg's Lyric Suite.  Nor was it to be heard in the St. Lawrence's dazzling, rumbustious world premiere performance of David Bruce's Gumboots, for string quartet and clarinet (again with Todd Palmer) or in the musicians' energetic yet finely worked-out account of Dvorak's String Quartet No. 13 in G Major.

But I'm going to continue to grouse -- not, this time, about Extreme Dynamics, but about Extreme Tempi, in Anne-Sophie Mutter's approach to the three Bach violin concerti at Carnegie in mid-October.  Fast movements whizzed by like express trains, and some of the slow movements were almost absurdly attenuated.  At times, this gifted violinist seemed to be saying, "Since I can play it this fast" -- or this slow -- "I will."  This can't have been her real motivation, but it's hard to imagine what that motivation was.  Boh.....  Mutter's partner in the Double Concerto was Vilde Frang, a young Norwegian woman whom I had heard play the Sibelius Concerto beautifully a few years ago, when she was still in her teens; she had no trouble keeping up with Mutter's sprints (nor did the Camerata Salzburg, which the German violinist led from the fiddle), but her sound is smaller and sweeter than that of her powerful mentor: the match didn't work.

Even stranger was Maurizio Pollini's performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony and James Levine, also at Carnegie.  The well known first theme, for instance, which the orchestra stated simply and beautifully, was immediately distorted by Pollini, who continued to distort it throughout the movement.  His playing often sounded mechanical, sometimes to the point of brutality.  Boh.....  On the same program, however, the BSO and Levine delivered one of the best performances I've ever heard of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" Symphony (so effective that a man in the row behind mine passed out at the end of the March and had to be removed from the premises) as well as the local premiere of Leon Kirchner's brilliantly scored but oddly sound-track-like The Forbidden.

Over to Avery Fisher Hall, where the New York Philharmonic and Rafael Fruehbeck de Burgos gave a first-rate concert performance of Falla's opera La vida breve.  The vocal soloists sounded worn out -- and the performance I attended was only the second of four -- but Fruehbeck knows every subtlety of this score and communicates it effectively.  Okay, this is not one of the greatest works ever written, or even one that many listeners would want to hear often, but when it is played as well as it was on this occasion it is a delight.

Next door at the Met, I attended a revival of last season's Lucia production, and my overall impressions were unchanged: Daniel Ostling's sets are mainly ingenious and often beautiful, and Mary Zimmerman's staging is often effective but sometimes ridiculous, as in the family photo-op during the second-act sextet -- the crux of the drama.  Diana Damrau in the title role held her own against recollections of Natalie Dessay's stunning interpretation of the title role last year; Piotr Beczala was a much better Edgardo than Marcello Giordani; and the other singers were all adequate-to-excellent.  Conductor Marco Armiliato puzzled me in this opera as he has in others: he seems both knowledgeable and musical, but, as far as I can discern, he doesn't distinguish between the notion of shaping an opera around the singers and that of following the singers wherever they happen to go.  The distinction is subtle but important.  Contrary to common belief, most singers do not want to be left to their own devices.  Just as they continue to go to coaches for suggestions and assistance when they learn new roles, so they value strong leadership in the pit so that their roles dovetail with those of their colleagues and blend as seamlessly as possible into the opera as a whole.  And, as in every other art, in opera, too, true freedom requires discipline.  Of course opera conductors must be able to follow singers who make mistakes or suddenly find themselves in vocal trouble, but giving an interpretation a real shape is an even more important conductorial responsibility than being able to function as a musical traffic cop -- and this is as true in a "singers' opera" like Lucia as it is in a "conductor's opera" like Goetterdaemmerung.  This was the essential difference between Levine's thoughtful way with Lucia last year and Armiliato's laissez-aller approach this year.  Granted, a new production is given much more rehearsal time than is allotted to a revival, but still.....

I confess that I felt only slightly less antipathy toward John Adams's much-admired Doctor Atomic at the Met this season than toward Philip Glass's Satyagraha last season.  There is evidently a perverse streak in me that made me perceive Atomic's music as empty and long-winded, its libretto as pretentious, and both as mechanical and boring -- and I am not easily bored.  I suppose that in opera I can't manage to shift gears from modrnism (Berg, Stravinsky, et al.) into post-modernism. I apologize for this defect, but I suppose that, at sixty-two, I'm beyond salvation.

I loved most of what I saw and heard at the dress rehearsal of the Met's new production of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, but I won't comment until I've attended a performance.

A non-musical note: Whether you're living in New York or only visiting, between now and January 18th, go see the Frick Collection's small but fascinating exhibition, "Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze", with works on loan from museums around the world.  It will also give you a chance to admire -- whether for the first time or the hundredth -- the Frick's own astonishing assemblage of great paintings.  No "bohs" needed here!

Across Central Park at the other Met, I found Louis Langree's conducting of Don Giovanni technically capable but lacking the sort of emotional grip that can raise a decent performance to an excellent or even memorable one.  Ultra-fast tempi like Langree's in the last part of the first-act finale or the peroration of the sextet do not necessarily create drama, and in this instance they seemed actually to trivialize the musical and theatrical discourse rather than heightening its impact.  Ditto for the often ultra-leisurely pace of the recitatives.  Erwin Schrott has the makings of an outstanding Don Giovanni, but for my taste his singing in the performance I heard was often rhythmically undisciplined and his acting hammy -- although the latter defect must have had a lot to do with the stage direction of Marthe Keller: much of the action throughout has a sit-com-like tinge that cheapens the production.  The role of Donna Elvira may not be ideal for Susan Graham, but she is such a fine and intelligent artist that hearing her nuanced interpretation of it was stimulating as well as a pleasure.  Matthew Polenzani was an excellent Don Ottavio.  To my ears, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo sounded monochromatic as Leporello.  But mainly, as I was leaving the theater after the performance, I found myself thinking that no matter how much and how deeply I love dozens upon dozens of operas written before and after those of Mozart, there is simply nothing greater in the genre -- as music, as theater, or as a summation of the inner workings of the human animal -- than the three Mozart-Da Ponte masterpieces.

I also attended a performance ofSalome in the much-hailed Jurgen Flimm production, with Karita Mattila in the title role.  Her voice sounded strained and tired in the performance I heard, but it was a Saturday matinee, which singers generally find more trying than evening performances.  Besides, I can't think of anyone I would rather hear in this part, and all the other singers (especially Joseph Kaiser as Narraboth, Kim Begley as Herodes, Ildiko Komlosi as Herodias, and Juha Uusitalo as Jochanaan) also did excellent work.  The production itself, which showed Roman soldiers in plain outfits, Jews in Hassidic garb, and the toffs -- Herod, Herodias, their dinner guests, and Salome herself -- in modern formal dress, it made my mind go back, as it often does when I sit in the theater, to something that the great Italian director Giorgio Strehler told me years ago.  He said, more or less, "We can do Shakespeare with everyone in tails or everyone naked, or some of each, but we have to remember how miserable our ideas will appear next to the greatness of that text."  This statement can and should be applied to the interpretation of most works for the stage.  I don't mind radical interpretations if the director has turned every idea over in his/her mind for a very long time before deciding whether the realization of that idea will deepen our understanding of the work or will merely provoke for the sake of provoking.  The acting in Flimm's production is very good, but most of the other visual aspects seem to exemplify the "Ya Gotta Do Something, So How About This?" school of opera staging.  In the "Mysteries of Conducting" department, on the other hand, the gestures of Patrick Summers seemed generic and imprecise, at least as viewed from halfway back on the main floor, but the Met orchestra played incisively and powerfully for him.  I can only assume that he rehearses well and that much of the orchestra likes him. 

Which brings me to a New York Philharmonic concert under the baton of Marin Alsop.  I had never seen Alsop before, and I enjoyed these performances very much.  Bartok's Wooden Prince Suite seemed to me well thought-out and beautifully realized by conductor and orchestra, and the same was true, on the whole, of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which sounded fresh and powerful, not at all here-we-go-again-ish.  I disagree with the little caesura that Alsop introduced in the first movement: had it occurred only once, it might have sounded spontaneous and interesting, but when it happened the first time you knew that it would happen again -- and it did, and sounded artificial and corny.  In the finale, enthusiasm actually became a problem because it created too many climaxes: better to focus on rhythmic drive, of which there was plenty in this performance, and save the fortissimos and fortississimos for the very biggest moments.  Maybe Alsop forgot one of Richard Strauss's Ten Commandments for conductors: "Never look encouragingly at the brass."  But let's not be too picky: this was an enjoyable performance.  The central delight of the evening, however, was 23-year-old Polish pianist Rafal Blechacz's Philharmonic debut in Chopin's F minor (Second) Piano Concerto.  One could quibble that the finale lacked the sense of playfulness that some pianists brought or bring to it (I'm thinking of.recordings by Rubinstein and Ashkenazy), but Blechacz's playing was sensitive, intense, and technically impeccable throughout -- and with none of the extra-musical, look-ma-seventeen-hands shenanigans of some of today's other young keyboard heroes.  This is a very promising talent.

The concert -- the orchestra's first of the season -- began with the version for string orchestra of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, originallly written as the finale of the String Quartet, Op. 130.  The piece sounds more incisive in the dramatic sections and more delicate in the graceful ones when it is played by a great quartet rather than a full complement of instruments, but the Met Orchestra's strings are so fine, and Levine's concept of the work (which I'd bet he first learned under the aegis of his early mentor Walter Levin, founder and first violin of the legendary LaSalle Quartet) so rigorous that the performance was gripping from the first note to the last.

Not to be outdone by their horsehair-wielding colleagues, the orchestra's wind players and percussionists took the stage for a performance of Messian's Et exspecto resurrectionem, in honor of the centenary of the composer's birth.  I find this work's discourse much clearer than that of many of Messiaen's other large-scale compositions, but this may be a result of my own laziness.  Or perhaps the fact that the "Turangalila" Symphony, for instance, always gives me a colossal headache has prejudiced me against it.  In any case, in Et exspecto sonic beauty and formal rigor seem perfectly balanced.  Many thanks to Levine and his people for performing it with such care and conviction.

My religious sentiments, however, are much more in tune with those of Bill Maher than with those of Messiaen.  I saw Maher's movie Religulus this evening and enjoyed it immensely, Yes, his satire is often over the top, but he has an irresistible way of uncloaking hypocrisy and self-delusion -- and who can deny that the United States, increasingly overrun as it is with bible-thumping, war-mongering "creationists" and the like, is much in need of many more Mahers?