There may be no official piano festival contained in this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival, which runs through Aug. 22, but the first run of concerts almost seemed that way, hardly inappropriate since the Salzburg prodigy was not exactly a slouch at the instrument. I went to hear Piotr Anderszewski’s opening, all-Bach concert in the “Little Night Music” series at the Kaplan Penthouse on July 29 with considerable anticipation: His reputation is richly deserved, based upon his solid tone, flawless technique and grand, but not grandiloquent, style. The Partita No. 6 in E Minor was impressively, if somewhat stiffly, dispatched, reaching an unexpected climax in the melancholy Sarabande, which opened up with glorious sweep. The English Suite No. 6 in D Minor may be a more public, playful and somewhat artificial kind of piece, but Anderszewski gave it revelatory force. A cogent and lyrical account of its Sarabande was followed by a Double—a variation—so knowingly performed that it let us glimpse the secret inner life of the dance that had preceded it. The two Gavottes offered similar pleasures; No. 2 was an essay in sheer magic, its clanging rhythms delivered with radiant colors and a crystalline touch.

Two concerts with the Mostly Mozart Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall featured fine performances (heard on Aug. 5 and 8) by the pianists Nicholas Angelich and Stefan Vladar, respectively, but their conductors interested me more. Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s debut at the festival, heralded by a Sunday Times preview, was a momentous occasion. English Canada seems devoid of conductorial talent, but what is it about Quebec? Some six years ago, the absurdly underrated Bernard Labadie was turning in splendid performances at Mostly Mozart and at Glimmerglass, and now his younger colleague has appeared to carry on what seems to be a vibrantly lyrical national style.

Trained partially as a choral conductor, Nézet-Séguin is unashamed to express his elemental love of music. Having sat through Pierre Boulez’s catatonic rendition of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella last season at Carnegie Hall, I was not relishing a repeat of the score. But Nézet-Séguin’s rendition, with its pungent orchestral colors and crisply percussive rhythmic patterns, proved that this so-called neoclassical throwback came from the same pen that wrote The Rite of Spring. His interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony had a hard, driving swing at times, but none of the highlighted detail (a timpani whack, a thrust from the violas) disrupted the elegance of the total, silken texture.

And while we’re celebrating things French, let’s not forget Louis Langrée, the festival’s music director, who turned in one of the most impressive performances of his tenure on Aug. 8. France is not known as Brahms country, and Langrée’s account of the Fourth Symphony, the highlight of the evening, did not try to bring that vertical brand of German “profundity” to the composer’s valedictory Fourth Symphony; in a fleet but not flighty interpretation, it wore its autumnal colors lightly.

Phrases made soft landings, but sojourned to interesting places along the way, especially in the third and fourth movements, when something downright demonic began to bubble up to the surface—this was Brahms’ farewell to the liberal, German-Jewish musical culture that had nurtured him, and he knew that Vienna would soon see dark days. The wind section of this not-quite-perfect orchestra sometimes produced a slightly sour corporate sound, but Demarre McGill, the principal flutist, handled his mournful solo in the last movement with uncommon beauty and restraint.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker

editorial@observer.com

If you haven’t heard of this opera, then you haven’t heard of its composer, either. Zimmermann—who was born in 1918 and who died, by his own hand, in 1970—was an enormously learned and diligent composer who worked in many genres during his career. But his reputation rests solely on Die Soldaten.

Traumatized by his experience of the Second World War and its aftermath, Zimmermann fashioned his libretto from Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s 1776 play, a renowned example of the Sturm und Drang movement in German literature. Marie, the teenage daughter of a fancy goods merchant in the city of Lille, is tempted into having an affair with Desportes, a French soldier and nobleman, spurning the good-hearted young merchant Stolzius, who’s madly in love with her. Desportes is but one of a group of soldiers who seem more interested in carousing than fighting, and who toy with Marie until, raped by Desportes’ huntsman, she ends up destitute, unrecognized by her father; Stolzius gets his revenge by killing Desportes before taking his own life. At the end, the drama is engulfed in the sounds of screams and marching. We have reached the abyss.

Die Soldaten is an odd thing—a great opera that doesn’t have a lot of great music. Once favorably compared to the expressionist operas of Alban Berg, it now seems to come up short. The classical structures that underlie its often unsettling scenes, as in Wozzeck, are intellectual poses rather than expressive tools, and Zimmermann’s characters are two-dimensional compared to the fully rounded, lyrically effusive beings that populate Lulu. Only in two scenes—the tour de force finale of Act II, in which Marie’s downfall is depicted from three perspectives at once, and the Rosenkavalier-like trio that ends Act III—does the music truly rise to the occasion.

ZIMMERMANN WAS BOTH a man of his time and a man ahead of it. The foundation of his style was the kind of 12-tone music—gray, grim, forbidding—that dominated the 1960s, but it’s the collagelike way in which other kinds of music—jazz, Gregorian chant, folk songs, Bach chorales—are mixed in that gives the piece a manic, back-and-forth bounce that suits the obsessive zeal with which Zimmermann attacked his subject. Somehow, Die Soldaten works.

The Cologne Opera rejected the wildly impractical original version, designed to be performed on twelve acting areas, embellished by three cinema screens, and with part of the huge orchestra sequestered off-stage. The successful 1965 premiere was mounted on a conventional proscenium stage—as was New York City Opera’s 1991 production at the State Theater, which some cognoscenti still rhapsodize about.

I may only need to see Die Soldaten once in my life, but I feel lucky to have experienced David Pountney’s production, which was first offered by the RuhrTriennale festival in 2006. Some critics have not been kind; the venerable John Simon (writing for Bloomberg.com) hoisted the cry of “Regietheater”—that very German affliction which causes directors to take wild liberties with a composer’s stage directions in order to make some kind of aesthetic or political point.

But with one ridiculous exception (rapists wearing Santa Claus suits? really?), Mr. Pountney’s liberties seemed necessary to make sense out of an almost unstageable piece. Costumes ranged widely to evoke the Edwardian era, Weimar Germany and the frozen fields of Stalingrad—a whole arena of social and military conflict that stretched across decades.

By now you’ve heard of the two massive, movable sets of steel bleachers (conceived by Robert Innes Hopkins) that transferred approximately 1,000 listeners back and forth on railroad tracks along a narrow strip of stage that stretched from one end of the hall to the other. The immediate effect, as one sat down and gazed into the distance, was chilling: The transition between Acts I and II, in which stark white lights lit up the steel cage above us that held the whole structure together, was breathtaking in its wonder.

Amid all this expensive architectonic grandeur, a living, breathing performance (backed up by the excellent Bochum Symphony and its conductor, Steven Sloane) took place. Claudia Barainsky’s full physique may not have suggested destitution, but her Marie was both emotionally responsive and vocally disciplined; Peter Hoare’s agile high tenor lent an almost sympathetic elegance to the unsympathetic role of Desportes. (The two share an astonishing scene involving a dance, a quill pen and a cascade of daunting coloratura.)

Claudio Otelli’s utterly committed portrayal of Stolzius as a pathetic melancholic was so effective that you almost understood why Marie was tempted to leave him. Claudia Mahnke sang the role of Marie’s sister Charlotte with an unfailingly warm tone, and Kay Stiefermann was a dashing and distinctive Major Mary, another of Marie’s suitors. Two distinguished veterans—Hanna Schwarz and Helen Field—lent genuine grandeur and profound expression to their motherly roles.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker.

rplatt@observer.com.

Four days later, the venerable Minetta Tavern went out of business. VOX, however, is stronger than ever in its ninth year. What began as a kind of operatic quilting bee, with New York City Opera acting as an umbrella for a collection of small, intrepid New York ensembles, has become a streamlined two-day festival firmly under the company’s control, drawing a substantial audience and a cloud of friendly buzz.

George Manahan, the company’s music director, led two of the Saturday session’s five pieces with his typically unflappable command. Throughout the day, the City Opera Orchestra and a collection of young singers performed with an abundance of professionalism and aplomb.

The selection of excerpts from new works was wonderfully varied, though the quality varied, too. Cary Ratcliff’s Eleni, with a libretto by Robert Koch based on Nicholas Gage’s book about his family’s brutal experiences during the Greek Civil War, boasted City Opera diva Emily Pulley in its title role. But it was hobbled by inept word setting and a risibly overblown Hollywood-style score.

Another star soprano, Lauren Flanigan, was similarly wasted in Veronika Krausas’ trivial and disorganized The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth. Steve Potter’s The Officers was a noble try at experimental opera, a critique of the creepily homogenized language used in advertising, airport signage and political discourse—but the intellectual invention could not hide the lack of musical nourishment.

Yet the day opened well and ended even better. Our Giraffe, by the composer Sorrel Hays and the librettist Charles Flowers, was a deft and humorous study of a little-known historical episode: the gift of a giraffe from Ottoman Egypt to King Charles X of France in 1826. As the French—being French—argue decorously over the political, commercial and sexual ramifications of the giraffe’s arrival, Ms. Hays gives them music of a simplicity and charm happily reminiscent of Virgil Thomson.

John King’s Dice Thrown, a fantasia on a grand and intoxicating late poem by Mallarmé, was more like a revelation. Mr. King is an esteemed downtown veteran who has composed two scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; like Mr. Cunningham’s partner, John Cage, he composes using chance operations, creating music that eschews any resemblance to traditional tonality or syntax.

And yet, in a performance by the stunningly accurate soprano Melissa Fogarty, the piece became a dazzling coloratura solo of compelling dramatic urgency. The soprano and the orchestral players (conducted ably by Marc Lowenstein) have considerable freedom in interpreting the “materials” of Mr. King’s fragmentary score: Each performance makes for a unique, unrepeatable composition.

Nothing’s easier than to write bad music this way—and as the second of two 15-minute versions began its run, I was not hopeful.

But about five minutes in, wonderful things started happening. The English horn player intoned his phrases with an ear-catching lyrical arc; the strings responded in kind, and Ms. Fogarty starting creating a character, not just a “part.” A musical country you could call Mallarmé Land cohered into being: We could picture its mountains, its cities, its fretting housewives, its squabbling politicians.

Perhaps it’s the listener, ultimately, who breathes life into Mr. King’s piece, or pieces. But it’s the composer’s invention that makes that possible, and Mr. King’s is of a rare kind.

TO THE DISTINGUISHED Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink I owe one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life: his Carnegie Hall performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 2003, a magnificent collaborative effort that featured not only the Boston Symphony Orchestra but also such singers as Lorriane Hunt Lieberson and Simon Keenlyside. And to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra I owe my first experience of Shostakovich’s titanic Fourth Symphony, from their thrilling recording of the work under André Previn.

But when Mr. Haitink, the Chicago Symphony’s principal conductor, and the Fourth Symphony came together at Carnegie Hall last Friday night (in the second program of a two-concert CSO residency), the performance, while admirable and secure, was far less than I’d hoped for.

It was announced early this month that Riccardo Muti, having twice spurned the New York Philharmonic, will take up the music directorship of the CSO in 2010. Mr. Muti will inherit from Mr. Haitink an ensemble that, in its carefully blended sound and seamless unity of purpose, can perform at the exalted level of the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Mr. Haitink’s great gift as a conductor is to make musicians know, in his firm but collegial style, that only their best efforts will do; his weakness is that he sometimes does so little with what he elicits.

From his rendering of Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 (“The Clock”), which began the program, you would have detected the composer’s genius as a master craftsman, but not the magical mixture of wit, poetry, humor and melancholy that makes his music live.

Go to the recordings. In the hands of a Pierre Monteux, a Haydn symphony is an opera buffa; under Leonard Bernstein, it’s a jazz improvisation; under Antal Dorati, it’s Romantic poetry read with the detachment of a gentleman scholar. The gold-plated competence offered by a man like Bernard Haitink is a great thing—indeed, the world can’t get along without it. But it lacks the touch of the divine.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

“Could an opera make us stand up for the truth?” asked one poster. “Could an opera make us warriors for peace?” asked another. (The outdoor campaign was underwritten by Met patron Agnes Varis, a devoted political activist and philanthropist.) If Giuseppe Verdi were around, he would have asked, “Can this opera make money?”—a philosophy that brought forth such trivial entertainments as La Traviata, Aida and Otello, not to mention a piece of fluff called Tristan und Isolde.

I don’t doubt for a moment Mr. Glass’ commitment to the ideals that his opera promotes—it’s an heroic portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in his first years as a defender of the Indian people—but he’s just as much a man of the theater as old Verdi.

Satyagraha (which means “Truth Force” in Sanskrit) has been making money for the same reasons those other operas have: It has something to say, and mostly says it well. Mr. Glass’ brand of minimalism can be maddeningly plain, yet it’s the product of a transformative genius. The operatic creations of John Adams, which the Met will present in future seasons, may be more subtle and dramatically varied, but they’re built on Mr. Glass’ template.

The composer and his librettist, Constance DeJong, adapted a sequence of texts from the Bhagavad Gita into a series of tableaux that depict Gandhi’s struggle to organize oppressed Indian workers in South Africa in the years before the First World War. The action is often static, but then so was Gandhi’s method: his philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which inspired Martin Luther King Jr.

A sumptuous staging would have gone against everything Gandhi stood for. The production team of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch—who first crafted their version for English National Opera—therefore made their simple sets out of corrugated metal, with reams of newsprint used as props and bits of décor. (Corrugated metal was used by the colonial powers to build fences and basic structures; Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion helped build support for his cause.) The contributions of a “Skills Ensemble” of aerialists and puppeteers maximized the mythic wonder inherent in the story.

If economy and invention went hand in hand, it was often to the benefit of Mr. Glass, whose music was sometimes too spacious for its own good. (Let’s just say that Act II could use a hefty 10-minute cut.) Perhaps Act III—a tragic tone poem built largely on the alternation of two chords—was the most effective. Dr. King motioned silently from on high; blocks of newsprint, affixed like funeral plaques to a massive wall, were stripped off to reveal television screens showing footage from Bloody Sunday and the March on Washington.

Act III is also largely a duet for tenor and conductor, and it profited from the solid musicality and poignant phrasing of Richard Croft (singing the role of Gandhi) and Dante Anzolini (in his podium debut). In the roles of Miss Schlesen and Mr. Kallenbach, two of Gandhi’s European followers, Rachelle Durkin and Earle Patriarco provided sterling support. The Met Orchestra, used to the subtleties and complexities of Mozart and Wagner, cranked out Mr. Glass’ endless arpeggios with professional dispatch.

ONE OF MR. Glass’ biggest fans is the pianist Bruce Levingston, who gathered a glittering audience for his solo recital at Zankel Hall on April 14. Among the crowd, one could spot the distinguished composers Charles Wuorinen and Sebastian Currier, there to hear their music world-premiered; the pianist’s pianists Ursula Oppens and Jerome Lowenthal; the actor Andrew McCarthy; the writer Dana Vachon; and Michael Stipe and David Rockefeller, who need no introduction.

Not everyone had a Platinum card, of course. But what all these boldface names have in common (like the composers Mr. Levingston has championed over the years, a list that includes David Del Tredici, Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Lisa Bielawa and Mr. Glass) is that they’re among the best at what they do. It would be a mistake to see Mr. Levingston’s nearly decade-long series of Premiere Commission concerts as fancy social occasions: They’re serious events in which both new and familiar works are presented with a singular combination of challenge and delight.

Mr. Levingston picked pieces that speak to his strengths, which are considerable, and performed on the same carefully voiced Steinway that Alfred Brendel used for his farewell New York recital. The columnar chords of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, a seminal work of Baltic minimalism, came through with a remarkable radiance and calm, as did the liquid sequences of a Debussy étude. Mr. Levingston’s New York-premiere performance of the prominent German composer Wolfgang Rihm’s Brahmsliebewalzer, a surreal though loving tribute to the master, allowed his rendition of Brahms’ late Intermezzo in E Major, which immediately followed, to strike our ears with refreshment and wonder.

Both Liszt’s daunting Vallée d’Obermann and Mr. Currier’s absorbing and exquisitely crafted Departures and Arrivals seemed not only played but lived through, musical diaries that seamlessly mixed the composers’ thoughts with those of their interpreter. Composers cherish these kinds of concerts; the Premiere Commission series should go on forever.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

Ms. Mattila was warmly received after the first night of the revival of the Met’s 1980 production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893) on Jan. 29, but I doubt that her performance will inspire fevered memories. It has been widely reported that the Met is making a new production of Tosca for the magnificent Finnish soprano in the 2009-10 season, and I think she’ll fit the role of the great diva—from the beginning, a petulant and tempestuous character—better than she did the doe-eyed Manon, the pretty, middle-class French teenager who, brought into a life of luxury in pre-revolutionary Paris, cannot help but destroy Des Grieux, the young student who’s besotted with her.

Her beautifully “cool” Nordic sound may be a detriment in shaping a role that demands warm-blooded Italianate tone color and legato, but there’s no reason why a non-Italian singer can’t make a splash as Manon. To my eyes and ears, Ms. Mattila barely registered dramatically in Act I (the superb Dale Travis, as the old roué Geronte, acted rings around her) and gave a rather tarty and brazen Lulu-type characterization—more redolent of Weimar Germany than the ancien régime—in Act II. Only in the two final, tragic acts was the 47-year-old soprano truly convincing, seeming to bring her own experience as an older and wiser woman to the fore.

Her Des Grieux was Marcello Giordani. When he’s good, this tenor is a kind of latter-day Carlo Bergonzi, a singer whose timbre isn’t memorable but whose style and professionalism are an anchor for any production. The Met is asking a lot of him this year: Not only did he sing Edgardo to Natalie Dessay’s Lucia on the season’s opening night, but the house is bringing him back in March to sing the title role in Verdi’s powerful Ernani, which once belonged to Luciano Pavarotti.

I was looking forward to hearing Mr. Giordani sing at the New Year’s Eve Concert at La Fenice in Venice, but he pleaded illness (and was replaced by the sturdier, no-nonsense tenor Walter Fraccaro). During Act I of Manon Lescaut, I feared that Mr. Giordani still had the same Euro-bug in his throat: His singing was messy and frequently off pitch. But in Act II he somehow got hold of his instrument and used it well for the rest of the night.

This opera, so flawed and yet so thrilling, needs younger singers and a fresh production that will get rid of the kitschy early-80’s glamour of the Met’s current staging and burrow down to the fervid passion of the score. If there was a true streak of giovinezza in the performance, it came from James Levine and his wonderful orchestra, who offered sharp rhythms, sinuous phrases and cashmere textures that maximized the ardor of Puccini’s post-Wagnerian idiom.

ITALIAN MUSIC IN the 20th century was inevitably altered by the irresistible wave of modernism, but the lyric warmth and theatrical verve of the Italian tradition survived within it, as the long career of Luciano Berio (1925-2003) shows.

It was the New York Philharmonic that premiered Berio’s most famous work, Sinfonia, in 1968. The once-famous Swingle Singers—the smooth, scat-driven a cappella group that helped provide the soundtrack to the Age of Aquarius—took on the eight amplified vocal parts at the premiere. Last week it was the turn of the frighteningly competent Synergy Vocals group from London. Lorin Maazel, seemingly a little weary from all the Wagner he’s been conducting over at the Met recently, led a firm but dispassionate performance on the night I attended (Jan. 31).

Sinfonia, a work that not only uses texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett but that was shaped by contemporary streams of structuralist and semiotic theory, escapes the expressive prison that enclosed so much music of its time—but only just. Johannes Brahms was also a deeply intellectual composer, but in his eloquent Fourth Symphony, which Maazel conducted smartly after intermission, he never let it show. That’s not so easy anymore.

The composer Steven Stucky, who introduced the performances of Sinfonia, maintains that listeners don’t need a special background “to enjoy it.” I disagree: I think you need a background in the late 1960’s, a vital, destructive and fractured time that helped create an atmosphere for a music that shared the same attributes. To enjoy Berio’s collection of 14 Sequenzas for solo instruments, however, you need only have a love of music, a love that a marathon concert at the Rose Theatre on Feb. 2—by Philharmonic musicians and guest artists—would have extravagantly confirmed.

In a style that dispensed with the comforts of regular phrases and tonal centers, Berio offered up music of coloristic variety, polyphonic brilliance and technical innovations that challenge the most virtuosic of performers—and created the finest suite of unaccompanied pieces since Bach. Among the fine performances I was able to hear, I especially enjoyed the ravishing feast of subtle detail that the flutist Robert Langevin brought out in Sequenza I; the cool mastery and charcoal timbre of the pianist Amy Briggs Dissanayake in Sequenza IV; and the sheer endurance in Sequenza XII of the bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, who gave a sleek and unruffled cohesion to an unruly bear of a piece.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

At the center of it was Lorin Maazel, who, despite his advanced age—and the critical drubbing he regularly endures—remains the most resilient conductor on the American scene. On Jan. 7, after an absence of 45 years, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera to lead a triumphant revival of Die Walküre.

Three days later, his full-time employer, the New York Philharmonic, announced what promised to be an especially engaging final season for Mr. Maazel, who has been the orchestra’s music director since 2002 and is due to retire in June of 2009. One of the last tasks of Mr. Maazel’s tenure will be to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, the so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”—the kind of late-Romantic bombast that he revels in.

Last week’s triumph was of a quieter kind—a performance of impressive subtlety and understanding. New York Wagnerites have become used to the James Levine style, an endlessly flowing sound, almost wanton in its luxury, that radiates from deep within the orchestra and can occasionally overwhelm the singers. But Mr. Maazel, whose knowledge of this music matches Mr. Levine’s, immediately put his own stamp on the piece, crafting a sound that was drier and more restrained, gaining in clarity what it lost in color.

With the singers Adrianne Pieczonka, Clifton Forbis and Mikhail Petrenko all excellent and free from strain, Act I became like chamber theater, though of an exceptionally muscular kind. The whole thing made such sense that even the longtime production’s cartoonish sets and costumes lost their tackiness. And in the few moments when Mr. Maazel really let the orchestra go—as in Hunding’s angry condemnation of his dangerous house guest, Siegmund—the effect was all the more powerful for its rarity.

Mr. Maazel’s deliberative approach took some of the excitement out of Acts II and III, but he provided a clear sonic platform on which James Morris (at 61, a remarkably strong Wotan), Lisa Gasteen (Brünnhilde) and Stephanie Blythe (Fricka) could work their magic. The big nonsurprise surprise was Ms. Blythe, in her first Wagner performance at the Met, once again walking away with the show: the Fricka-Wotan Act II confrontation was actually funny. This woman can do no wrong.

ALSO AT THE Met is a new production of Hansel and Gretel, which has been running since Christmas Eve. Instead of Maazelian wisdom and a traditional staging, we have a sleek new production (by Richard Jones, originally for the Welsh National Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago) and a young (and sleek) conductor, Vladimir Jurowski.

I wish Alan Gilbert all the best as Lorin Maazel’s replacement, but watching Mr. Jurowski put the Met Orchestra through its paces, I couldn’t help but wonder if the New York Phil’s administrators considered hiring this young thoroughbred, who at 36 is the newly appointed principal conductor of the London Philharmonic. Some of the Levine-style luxury came back to the Met ensemble, along with a shimmering palette of woodwind sound—and an inexorable, Tchaikovskian languor—that seemed of Mr. Jurowski’s own conjuring.

If you can have an adult production of Humperdinck’s perennial family favorite, Mr. Jones’ is almost it. Gertrude—Hansel and Gretel’s despairing mother—plays with overdosing on pills; the Sandman (sung with gentleness and poise by a newcomer, the American mezzo Sasha Cooke) is an ugly old crone in a brown raincoat; and John Macfarlane’s curtain drops (a white plate with a smear of blood, a lurid red mouth with a swirl of white teeth about to crunch) aim for the putrescence of a Francis Bacon.

As the starving scamps, the athletic Alice Coote and the lissome Christine Schäfer sang with plenty of personality but consistently mangled their words. Only the great veteran English tenor Philip Langridge, sporting an outrageous fat suit as the Witch, managed to do justice to the King’s English, even when his mouth was full of chocolate and flour.

I SHLEPPED ALL the way to Merkin Concert Hall, and all I got was this fancy new lobby. Surely I wasn’t the only member of the city’s classical cognoscenti who muttered those words after being summoned for the cute little gala on Jan. 8 celebrating the hall’s reopening: The auditorium itself, apart from the reupholstered seats, seemed little changed. (In fact, improvements have been made to the mechanical systems, the restrooms and backstage areas.)

The architect, Robert A. M. Stern, New York’s current master of luxe, has given the Kaufman Center a great prow of a marquee jutting on to West 67th Street, and has replaced the cluttered and charmless lobby with something bigger and more glamorous. At least his changes did no harm: The hall’s sound, in a concert ably led by Aaron Jay Kernis—which featured a chamber orchestra and the soprano Esther Heideman performing music by Mr. Kernis and by Aaron Copland—seemed even brighter and more crisp than a year ago.

Time was when Merkin Concert Hall was a place where cutting-edge classical groups performed and ambitious young musicians came to make the scene. The auditorium still hosts a fair number of concerts, but with the ascendancy of Miller Theatre and the arrival of Zankel Hall, it would seem that Merkin’s days as a programming powerhouse are unlikely to return. Yet given the Kaufman Center’s broad cultural mission, that may be no great loss: Places for young people are coveted in the center’s music schools, and as the gala concert closed with a performance by Face the Music, its eager new-music group, we heard that they have plenty of talent of their own.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker. He can be reached at rplatt@observer.com.

That this event came off at all—and it did, with joy and skill and dedication—is a tribute to the hard work and imagination of Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, and his indefatigable colleagues. But a more subtle mark of success was scored several days beforehand, when the media Web site Gawker served up a tart little parody of the whole Berlin craze. (“New York is in love with BERLIN now.... [B]efore you could say ‘Bienvenue’ we ended up back at my hotel drinking cheap vodka and singing Kurt Weill songs with a dwarf accordionist, a Flamenco dance troupe and three Ukrainian baritones that we randomly met.”) Setting up a festival that brings Stravinsky to Upper Manhattan kids is one thing; getting the smart alecks of Lower Manhattan to notice it is quite another.

Ah, mein Schatz, how this little Berlin in Lights snuck up on us—a film screening here, a cabaret series there. But classical music is still the lifeblood of Carnegie Hall, and that blood is running strong, particularly in the case of the Berlin Philharmonic and its shaggy-haired British maestro.

There are people who complain that under Sir Simon the Berlin Philharmonic is not what it once was, and this is undeniably true. Gone is the machinelike perfection and thick, luxuriant timbre of the Herbert von Karajan years. Gone as well are the less predictable attractions of the Claudio Abbado regency, in which a high-flown Italianate lyricism was balanced by a curiously dark and grainy sound palette in the lower registers—a dichotomy reflective of the sensual and intellectual sides of the great Milanese conductor.

The product forged by Mr. Rattle (who’s been known to have occasional disagreements with his players) is not without its advantages: A battalion of newly hired young players has imparted a shivering vibrancy to the sound, which is now delivered with a clear sense of separation between the various instrumental choirs. The problem is that these qualities are closely tied to the strengths and weaknesses of the conductor.

Von Karajan, with his dictatorial control, crafted a sound; Mr. Rattle, in his very English way, tries to urge one into being. The baton technique is more square and blunt: Cohesion of ensemble can sometimes suffer (as it did in the frisky second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 at Carnegie on the night of Nov. 16), and the lyrical phrasing, while often lovely, can seem earnest, heavy and earthbound.

But Mr. Rattle is alert to what the Philharmonic, and its city, must now be: no longer a Cold War fortress but an open and international entity, with all the change and vulnerability that that can bring. It’s a matter of context—something this conductor expresses with his mastery of musical form. We first heard it in a concert on Nov. 12 in which Mr. Rattle, conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela in a program he shared with his phenomenal young protégé, Gustavo Dudamel, led a performance of Shostakovich’s own Symphony No. 10 that not only raised the level of the students’ playing to professional status but gave the heartrending emotions of the composer’s music an almost classical nobility and poise.

It worked just as well with the Philharmonic and the works of Mahler: This conductor is at his best with 20th-century music, and it’s with Mahler that 20th-century music begins. Part of Mr. Rattle’s new openness is the freedom he seems to impart to his solo players. The contributions of the principal flute, horn and trumpet were especially memorable in the Symphony No. 10; the principal oboe took the diva role in Das Lied von der Erde, setting the stage for the singing of the tenor Ben Heppner and the baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Mr. Heppner’s heraldic, ringing tone was occasionally pinched at the top, but Mr. Quasthoff—like a singer he admires, Frank Sinatra—sang with an alluring, easy intimacy that belied the countless hours of consideration needed to produce it.

New music was also a prominent part of Mr. Rattle’s concerts. Thomas Adès’ Tevót preceded Das Lied von der Erde on the evening of Nov. 14, and I preferred it to György Kurtág’s Stele, which preceded Mahler’s Tenth. Mr. Adès, an Englishman, is currently the only person under 40 who can be confidently called a Great Composer; his works, dazzlingly eclectic in influence but stunningly original in outlook, have a way of instantly joining the repertory.

Tevót, an expansive yet gentle meditation on the Hebrew word for musical “bars” (Mr. Adès’ partner is the Israeli video artist Tal Rosner), will now make its way among the world’s leading orchestras. On the next evening Mr. Adès, a formidable pianist, performed his Piano Quintet in Zankel Hall with members of Berlin’s Scharoun Ensemble; the work employs a limpid, Schubertian lyricism within a complex rhythmic structure that makes it sound as if the music were suspended mysteriously in midair. It is, however, here to stay.

The distinguished Mr. Kurtág is just as original, but with Stele, a short, sluggish, slowish piece that seemed to mix all the colors of the palette into a swirl of medium gray, he imparted the message that his music always seems to: We see through a glass darkly, and once we’ve drained it, we die.

Fortunately, Mr. Kurtág’s message was contradicted by the indomitable energy of those Stravinsky concerts in Washington Heights.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker.

That newness, radiant with emotions dark and bright, was to be found at the city’s more intimate concerts, where the true musical creativity of the town is bubbling up with the force of a magic spring. Classical concertgoing really can have the emotional immediacy of a great novel—never more, perhaps, than when an actual novel is thrown into the mix.

Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006), like his most recent novel, Exit Ghost, is not exactly a barrel of laughs: A successful advertising man, having made a mess of most of the relationships in his life, faces retirement, illness and death with a dogged stoicism that, until the very end, fails to generate even a ray of redemptive light. But at the Takács Quartet’s concert on Oct. 23 at Zankel Hall—in which selections of Everyman, read by Philip Seymour Hoffman, played a crucial role—the audience confronted the book’s dark themes with an eagerness that approached exhilaration. Mr. Roth, who was present, joined the performers for a thunderous ovation at the end of the evening.

Edward Dusinberre, the first violinist of the acclaimed ensemble, read the novel in preparation for a visit to his 103-year-old grandmother’s nursing home, and Mr. Roth’s three cemetery scenes so impressed him that—with the support of the author, a chamber-music fan—he organized a concert around them. “Those scenes have a very musical quality,” Mr. Dusinberre told me, “like a composer developing a theme.”

It was Mr. Roth who recommended Mr. Hoffman. Sitting in a tall armchair, sometimes curled up around the paperback in his hands, the New York actor’s manner seemed at first somewhat casual and remote, but soon his reading became almost seductive, as he slipped elegantly and unobtrusively into each of the characters. The emotional shading of the third scene, where the unnamed Everyman confronts his own mortality by visiting his parents’ graves in a broken-down Jewish burial ground near Newark Airport, was devastating in its subtlety and force.

Surrounding these scenes were performances of brief, compelling works by the minimalist masters Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt. The longer its residence in America, the more the Anglo-American-Hungarian Takács seems to cultivate a fibrous Old World sound, completely different from the machine-drilled perfection of the Emerson Quartet: Hearing Takács play is like running your fingers over the color-flecked threads of a fine Harris Tweed.

I’ll not soon forget the image of the burly cellist, András Fejér, sounding out the bell-like pizzicato refrain of Mr. Pärt’s Fratres, which in its lonely grandeur (and ever spreading popularity) is the Barber Adagio of our time. A hellbent performance of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, Death and the Maiden, followed after intermission.

NEW CHAMBER MUSIC with voice—sung rather than spoken—enlivened two more concerts. Sequitur, one of the city’s smartest and most energetic ensembles, made an appearance at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall on Oct. 8. The mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger gave a fetching performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, her velvety vocalism matched by a delightfully gamine stage presence.

Soprano Tony Arnold, also onstage for the Sequitur performance, was the star of another concert three days earlier: the Miller Theatre’s “Composer Portrait” tribute to Esa-Pekka Salonen, the only composer-conductor since Leonard Bernstein who can claim major achievements both at the podium and as a composer.

There’s something a little hasty about some of Mr. Salonen’s works—surprisingly for such an astute performer, he sometimes doesn’t know when to just say his piece and get off. For all of his technical know-how, his music is best when he departs from the modernist style of such heroes as Luciano Berio and Witold Lutoslawski into a realm that’s simultaneously earnest, irreverent and very much his own.

If Mary Nessinger is the Jan DeGaetani of Generation X, then Tony Arnold is its Lucy Shelton. In Mr. Salonen’s Floof, a setting of a text by the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem about an android that teaches itself to write love poetry using the jargon of higher math instead of the language of hearts and bodies, Ms. Arnold effortlessly alternated between lucid coloratura vocalism and the roughest, most guttural sounds; conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and the Miller musicians drove home Mr. Salonen’s punchy, rugged brand of postminimalism with assurance and aplomb.

Other works offered their own peculiar pleasures. Memoria, a wind quintet that begins by bathing in the elegant yet mercurial textures of Debussy and Janacek and ends with a weirdly Stravinskian chorale (played with great panache by the Imani Winds), was both touching and unexpected. In Meeting, two musicians playing utterly dissimilar instruments ardently, angrily talk past each other, only to unite in a goofy celebration at the close—the harpsichordist Blair McMillen and the clarinetist Benjamin Fingland made a commanding pair.

In a later “Composer Portrait” concert, on Oct. 18, the human voice had no place at all. It consisted of one work—Wolfgang Rihm’s Hunts and Forms, a blistering 50-minute chamber symphony from 1995-2001. Mr. Rihm is sometimes described as a Mahlerian neo-Romantic, but this work, with its dreadnought ostinatos and slaughterhouse chorales, seems more like a post-Cold War updating of the language of Berg’s Lulu. Whatever it is, it was performed with riveting expertise by Mr. Milarsky and his Manhattan Sinfonietta, with the violinist Aaron Boyd and the English hornist James Roe, among others, tackling parts that verged on the impossible.

The next “Portrait”—of Ireland’s Gerald Barry (Nov. 2)—looks equally enticing. The Miller Theatre’s intrepid director, George Steel, has become New York new music’s indispensable man.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker.

The result was Margaret Garner, which had its New York premiere at City Opera’s opening night on Sept. 11. It’s the best new opera that Lincoln Center has heard in quite a while.

It might not have turned out this way. Ms. Morrison’s star power is incandescent, but she is not an experienced librettist, and her subject matter—which also served as the back story for her novel Beloved—could easily have invited a sensationalist treatment. Garner, an historical figure, was a slave in antebellum Kentucky who, during a botched escape attempt, decided to kill her 2-year-old daughter rather than let her be returned to a life of bondage. An operatic version of the complex and mysterious Beloved would have been a mess, but Ms. Morrison’s libretto, thankfully, offers a far more straightforward treatment of the story.

Ms. Morrison puts lofty, gorgeous sentences in the mouths of her uneducated slaves, but those words never sound forced or inappropriate. And Mr. Danielpour, a composer long derided for the over-the-top emotionalism of his scores (he once wrote a symphony that set texts from the self-help tome A Course in Miracles), has finally found a subject commensurate with his ambitions. His arias may have “applause cues,” but they often deserve them: The best, “A Quality Love,” lingered in my mind for days afterward.

The fine performances surely helped. Tracie Luck and Gregg Baker were commanding in the roles of Margaret and Robert, her husband; Joel Sorensen lent a ringing tenor and a sadistic demeanor to Casey, the plantation foreman. The best of all was Lisa Daltirus, as Cilla, Robert’s mother: She may have sung the role of a frail old woman, but she magnified that woman’s spirit with richly detailed acting and a soprano voice of arching power. The orchestra, under George Manahan, played with devotion and style.

“ENGROSSING” IS NOT AN ADJECTIVE YOU you would necessarily associate with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, one of the great audience favorites of the bel canto repertoire. Enthralling, perhaps, entertaining, yes, but even the finest performances aim simply to please the ear and the heart.

Well, Mary Zimmerman, the Chicago theater doyenne to whom Peter Gelb entrusted the opening-night production at the Metropolitan Opera (on Sept. 24), had different ideas. Her Lucia not only brought the action up to the mid-19th century of Donizetti’s day, but made the experience into something the Met has never seen before: an absorbing stage play that also happened to have great music, sung by a formidable cast.

At first I gave credit to James Levine’s evenly paced tempos. But Act II revealed Ms. Zimmerman’s imagination at full power. Lucia (Natalie Dessay) and her brother Enrico (Mariusz Kwiecien) move about their Scottish baronial hall with deceptive ease, remaking a scene “from life” as only a pair of seasoned actors can. And then, snap!—the action reaches a crisis, as he forces her to marry against her will, and we’re swept away. The normal suspension of disbelief that opera demands—people don’t sing in real life—was extraneous and unnecessary.

The Wedding Scene, which followed, was something magical. Its sextet is, of course, magnificent with the singers just standing still. But Ms. Zimmerman had the principals, the chorus, and the supernumeraries (as soldiers and domestics) create a captivating web of movement that culminated in a tableau of an old-time wedding photograph, complete with exploding flash. Instead of weakening the mood, she intensified it, teaching an operatic audience what theater people have always known: There are no small roles.

The big roles were filled with singers of substance. Ms. Dessay started the opera in a cautious, even fragile manner, but by the Act III Mad Scene she was a force of emotion, movement and cool, pure tone. Marcello Giordani, as Edgardo, has a tenor of true Italianate tinge, even if some of his phrases were rather bumpy in the delivery. Mr. Kwiecien’s broadsword baritone was a zealous companion to his potent acting; this young singer is now every bit a star.

Russell Platt is a composer and a music editor at The New Yorker.