He's got some bad blood here. After a courtship in 2000, and then again several times over the next eight years, he turned down the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, though he remained a frequent--and beloved--guest conductor, one of those guests whose reviews tended to be better than those of the orchestra's own directors. He had said that he didn't want to come to New York because he didn't want a full-time gig, but it turned out he just didn't want that full-time gig: In 2008, he unexpectedly agreed to take over the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and started there last fall.

So there was palpable tension surrounding his first trip to New York with his new ensemble, for a three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall last weekend. Would he include opera, which has formed the foundation of his reputation? Yes, it turned out--but more than that, the opera would be Verdi's Otello, the sweeping work that James Levine has conducted at the Metropolitan Opera more than any other piece.

In bringing Chicago to New York with Otello, Mr. Muti was making a statement, staking a claim. But any thoughts about the politics and strategy were swept away by the sheer power of Friday's thrilling, discomfiting performance. Despite being an unstaged concert production, it was dazzlingly vibrant; when the tenor and soprano singing Otello and Desdemona stood up in unison (at their music stands, in evening wear) for their final confrontation, it was shiver-inducing. The opera's headlong energy, the way it uncannily re-creates Shakespeare's play's unremitting drive toward destruction, has rarely felt so powerful.

It was the orchestra's show. Mr. Muti is known for a devotion to the letter of the score that some people have criticized as overly fastidious, but there was, as critics invariably note of him, the sense of having the gunk from decades of sloppy Otellos wiped miraculously away. The performance revealed moments and whole lines of music that are usually lost in attempts at Verdi's dense orchestration. Mr. Muti brought a transparency to those massive textures--you seemed to hear every instrument--yet the force and pure volume were stunning.

Simultaneously beefed up and pared down, the performance was relentless. The first act was one long, furious convulsion, exhausting and effective except for its stinting of the relaxation of the closing love duet. Mr. Muti drove the duet's tempo mercilessly, making clear that there is no respite in his vision of the opera. (It's an approach that occasionally veers towards rigidity.) Appropriately, given this conception, the players seemed tireless. The justly famous Chicago brass shone. The strings were both warm and sharp, with tremendous eloquence from the cellos. The orchestra's resident chorus was perfectly focused and clear.

There were moments that were almost too vivid, in which Mr. Muti and the orchestra seemed so intent on being in your face--with a savage violin line, an unexpected flute solo--that individual effects upstaged the drama. But the honesty and naturalness of Mr. Muti's phrasing always returned, bringing with it the proper perspective.

The orchestra was so effective that it seemed at times to crowd out the singers. As Iago, Carlo Guelfi was gruff and a little blustery, without the slow-burning menace of his orchestral accompaniment. His great "Credo" would have been just as terrifying, the first-act drinking song as ominously jovial, if he hadn't been singing at all: You got the whole character from the playing.

Krassimira Stoyanova was a mature, wary Desdemona who grew more convincing as the opera went on. She seemed strangely abstracted in the love duet--Mr. Muti's precision there made it difficult to project warmth and personality--but deeply affecting in her fourth-act "Willow Song" and "Ave Maria."

In a world notably low on great Otellos, the rising tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko shows great promise in the role, trumpeting Act I's public proclamations and bringing a moving simplicity to the final monologue. The only real evidence of his announced indisposition for a stomach illness was some vocal strain in the difficult sequence that ends Act II.

Otello was undoubtedly the event that Mr. Muti wanted it to be, and if the singers were hardly classic, that only kept the spotlight on the podium. There, one of the great conductors of our time was doing work that you could argue with and wonder over, work that made you hope that he and his new orchestra return early and often to strike fear in the hearts of New York musicians who have to live up to their example.

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Verdi, who now seems to be one of a few new hands, had more than a cameo on the campaign, producing an ad which got attention Upstate by casting Rick Lazio as an ostrich on the topic of the local economy, accompanied by a guy in an ostrich suit at Lazio events.

The "abortive" reference, though, was to an interesting little fight within the Clinton campaign in which Verdi was on the losing side. As Mike Tomasky writes in his book on the race, Verdi wanted Clinton to address some of the knocks on her, notably "carpetbagger," directly.

He proposed, for example, a spot that showed her policy agenda emerging from a carpetbag.

But Clinton's main media advisors, Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn, pushed back, and persuaded Clinton to stick with a more traditional media campaign.

"Penn and Grunwald's strategy was not a great hit with the press," Tomasky notes. "But it's the voters who matter."

Which is to say that we in the press are looking forward to Freddy's next round of ads.

The likely choice is apparently a respected Madison Avenue guy who dabbles occasionally in politics, Ellis Verdi.

The new faces from the corporate advertising world will be working with Ferrer aide Jonathan Prince, a Clinton administration hand. Prince, according to several Democrats, been Ferrer's point man on the television campaign, and will continue in that role.

Doak's firm had been reduced to serving as the production company, not the usual place of a high-payed media strategist, and has apparently lost interest in playing that role.

Several Democrats suggested that Verdi, who had a role (more to come) in Hillary's Senate run and is close to Prince, will have a hand in producing Ferrer's next round of television spots. Verdi also has a running relationship with the Ferrer consultants over at the Global Strategy Group.

Ferrer spokeswoman Jen Bluestein emails: "DCO's contract runs through the primary and we're currently talking to them and other firms about how we structure our team to ramp up to beat Mike Bloomberg in November."

So look for an word soon of a new team to "join" Doak on the campaign, and read "replace" for "join."

Since then, I've seen a handful of Forza s, and none has come close to matching my virgin experience. The Met's production several seasons ago was so crudely staged and sung that it seemed calculated to justify Julian Budden's description of the opera's tormented Calatrava family as "twice as large as life and half as life-like." Forza , which Verdi composed for the St. Petersburg Opera in 1861, is structured along the lines of a Hollywood chase movie of the 1920's. With its abrupt swings between revenge and religiosity and a couple of time-outs to accommodate a sexy, rabble-rousing gypsy, it seemed increasingly a relic of a creakier time, better remembered than restaged.

Or so I thought until the other night, when the Collegiate Chorale, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and a splendid cast, produced an unstaged Forza in evening dress at Carnegie Hall, under the baton of the Chorale's music director, Robert Bass. Concert operas, which allow the audience to suspend disbelief in visual and dramatic matters and give undiluted attention to the music, have a long history in New York of resurrecting neglected masterpieces and vaulting unknown singers into the stratosphere. (I am reminded of that brilliant Semele at Carnegie Hall 18 years ago, which helped usher in the golden age of Handel revivals and launched Kathleen Battle as a superstar.) With this performance, Mr. Bass and company have re-established Forza as a score whose supply of melodic adrenaline may exceed that of any of the composer's other works. (In many ways, Forza is the most Verdian of his operas.) The evening also confirmed suspicions about a young Italian singer, Salvatore Licitra: He is indeed the likeliest successor to the two dominant tenors of our time, Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo.

I missed Mr. Licitra's unexpected debut at the Met last May, when he was flown over from Italy at the 11th hour to replace an indisposed Mr. Pavarotti, who had been playing protracted peekaboo with his millions of fans over whether he would or would not end his career with a farewell Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca . The press and a cheering audience immediately anointed the 34-year-old pinch hitter as the big man's heir apparent, as much for his unruffled command of the stage as for the ease with which his lusty tenor penetrated the farthest reaches of the red velvet barn.

Last year, Sony Classical released three Licitra CD's: an Il Trovatore and a Tosca , both conducted by Riccardo Muti at La Scala, where Mr. Licitra has become a major draw, and a collection of Puccini and Verdi greatest-hit arias, an album portentously subtitled The Debut . On these recordings, Mr. Licitra is stunning-an immediately communicable singer with a Pavarotti-like relish for the long, liquid phrase and a Domingo-like urgency that pins your ears back with its driving thrust. Yet, mindful of my premature enthusiasm for Roberto Alagna, a previous contender who turned out to have a much smaller voice in person than his early recordings suggested, I reserved judgment until I could hear Mr. Licitra in the flesh.

Almost casually, he exceeded my hopes. A good-looking, broad-faced fellow of classic Italian-tenor build-on the short side, barrel-chested, a touch of salt-and-pepper in his beard-he arrived onstage somewhat furtively and without any apparent preparation (no planting of feet) delivered Don Alvaro's greeting to the woman he so fatally loves-"Leonora!"-with a ringing, athletic gracefulness. Mr. Licitra is a protégé of one of the exemplary postwar Verdi stylists, Carlo Bergonzi, and he has that great tenor's unforced elegance of line, command of mezza voce and the capacity to adjust the timbre of his voice to suit the requisite emotion, from a stentorian, almost baritone thickness that promises a great Otello one day, to the reedy plaintiveness of La Traviata 's Alfredo.

Listening to Mr. Licitra, I thought of something that one of Renée Fleming's teachers, Arleen Auger, said to the soprano when she was just starting out: "Imagine the different registers of your voice as a series of hotel floors, each with its own character." Mr. Licitra navigated the ascent to each floor with seamless ease, finding new colors in each room and demonstrating the peculiarly Italian gift of expansiveness that gives a sense of vistas opening up. At this stage of his career, he sings with a natural abandon that celebrates sheer vocal power over nuance; the goods are all there, but whether he has the sensitivity of his greatest predecessors remains to be seen.

Mr. Licitra was in excellent company. As Leonora, the Russian soprano Maria Guleghina-a woman of exceptional beauty and vocal heft-never let the audience forget that Forza is an opera of inescapable doom. As the vengeful Don Carlo, the baritone Mark Rucker nobly conveyed his obsessive commitment to family honor and matched Mr. Licitra for steely resolve in their great duet, " Solenne in quest'ora ." Marianne Cornetti delivered a no-nonsense Preziosilla, the gypsy fortuneteller. And the veteran Simon Estes-who was called in at the last minute to replace the highly touted young Bulgarian bass, Julian Konstantinov, as Father Guardiano-was a figure of imposing dignity. Mr. Bass marshaled the troops with rousing panache. (Why is he not heard more often in our orchestra pits?) And everyone onstage, including the beautifully paced choristers and musicians, showed such a palpable delight in the occasion that at one point I wondered whether they, too, had been initiated into opera by this still sturdy, irresistible warhorse.

I hesitate to put so half-formed a creative spirit as the young American composer Jake Heggie in the company of the composers of Tristan and the Faust Symphony, but Mr. Heggie's Dead Man Walking -which has just been given its local premiere by the New York City Opera-is an arch example of the sentimentalist muse at work: opera as therapy. Based on a memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, which recounts the author's journey from death-row counselor to activist against capital punishment, Dead Man Walking arrives as a Great White Hope for contemporary American opera: It proved a crowd-pleaser during its world-premiere run at the San Francisco Opera two years ago, and the current restaging represents the best collaborative efforts of seven American regional opera companies. The production, it must be said, is smashing, and the story of Sister Helen's affirmation of a condemned young man who, along with his brother, viciously murdered two teenagers, retains the power of the Tim Robbins film of the same title. But as opera, Dead Man - pace the opening-night audience, who roared their approval-is a dud.

A program essay notes that Mr. Heggie and his librettist, the playwright Terrence McNally, concentrated "not so much on the political and social issues involved in capital punishment, but rather on the intensely personal issues of forgiveness, love, retribution, and redemption." Fair enough: These themes have provided juice for just about every successful opera since the Renaissance, and besides, opera and politics rarely make good bedfellows. (Though I was happy to be spared the spectacle of fist-clenched choruses lined up on opposite sides of the death-penalty issue, I'd like to hear what Verdi might have done with it.) But even sure-fire themes require imaginative powers of conception and organization if they are to deepen our attention to a work that runs nearly three hours. Mr. Heggie and Mr. McNally-neither of whom has written a full-length opera before-command nothing like the resources for it.

The opening is stunning. After an eerily woven overture, the crime is enacted in a lakeside lovers' lane in Louisiana. As the teenage lovers make out-both nude, with the sort of perfectly toned bodies that are de rigueur onstage these days-cryptic bursts of percussion announce the two killers' entry from the shadows. Orchestral pandemonium ensues as one brother rapes the girl and the other shoots the boy. The girl screams; the rapist silences her with a knife. The next thing we hear is the sweet voice of Sister Helen, a wholesome young woman with Sally Field's spunk, singing a pastiche of an early American hymn ("He Will Gather Us Around") to a happy, multiracial group of children at her school, Hope House.

The idyll darkens as Sister Helen reads a letter from the unregenerate convicted rapist and murderer, Joseph De Rocher, who's now on death row. (His brother received a life sentence.) "Be careful, Helen," cautions Sister Rose, an African-American nun who has gospel fervor in her soul. But spunky Sister Helen won't be deterred. During a three-hour drive to the prison, she sings a monologue about herself and her "marriage" to Christ-"a hothead and so am I." If it's all a bit glib, in the way that has made Mr. McNally's plays about the gay life ( Love! Valour! Compassion! ) and the perils of being a diva ( Master Class ) so palatable to the Broadway unwashed, it still lays out the dramatic ground with seamless efficiency.

But from that point on, the evening moves with all the freshness of a network docudrama. We meet the suffering mother out of an old James Cagney movie who refuses to believe in her son's guilt (she remains curiously indifferent to the fate of her other son); the purple-faced father of the dead girl, who just can't see the greater charity in Sister Helen's devotion to his daughter's killer; and various stock supporting characters, including a gruff state trooper who tears up a speeding ticket for Sister Helen because he's got a mother with cancer. Mr. McNally is a writer who prefers to assert rather than show, and just when you can't imagine what on earth could possibly bind Sister Helen to the scurvy young killer, he supplies a doozy of an adhesive: nostalgia for Elvis Presley! (While the orchestra makes a tepid descent into R&B, the two of them intone a litany of Elvis titles: "Blue Suede Shoes," "Heartbreak Hotel," "That's All Right, Mama," etc.) And if you think you're not going to hear Sister Helen do an unaccompanied reprise of "He Will Gather Us Around" after Joseph finally confesses to his crime, begs forgiveness of the victims' parents and tells his stalwart redeemer "I love you" just as the first lethal injection kicks in, you haven't been paying attention.

A few operas have triumphed over even more thumping librettos, thanks to a great score's capacity to suspend disbelief (two of Verdi's most stirring operas, La Forza del Destino and Il Trovatore , do just that), but after the promise of Dead Man 's opening, Mr. Heggie's music remains hopelessly inadequate to the challenges of the material. Hitherto known as a composer of art songs, he has a talent for setting poetry to music that certain celebrated ladies of the opera world-among them, Frederica von Stade, Renée Fleming and Sylvia McNair-find ingratiating to their voices. But he seems incapable, thus far, of achieving a through-written score that establishes an individual sound world of its own and gathers in illumination as it goes along. If his half-melodies which soar out of nowhere, chug-a-chug orchestral writing and frenzied massed-voice climaxes seem familiar, it's not because they have established a sense of familiarity on their own terms, but because they echo so many superior composers, from ballet's Aaron Copland to Broadway's Leonard Bernstein to Hollywood's Max Steiner.

But the cast and musicians, under the musical direction of John DeMain, delivered as though they were scaling a masterpiece. Joyce DiDonato, as Sister Helen, was a consistently sympathetic presence, and I don't think I've heard better English diction from a singer in years. John Packard made a magnetic Joseph De Rocher, and Adina Aaron and Sheryl Woods gave luminous contributions as Sister Rose and Joseph's mother. A few nights earlier, I attended the company's opening-night performance of Puccini's ungainly triptych of one-act operas, Il Trittico . That production, directed by James Robinson, was also superbly mounted and sung, with Mark Delavan, Maria Kanyova, Fabiana Bravo and Carl Tanner leading an unusually potent array of young singers. Despite the disappointments of Dead Man Walking , this looks like City Opera's strongest season in years.

The composer's last masterpiece and the third of his three Shakespeare operas, Falstaff is also Verdi's only comedy. He was not renowned for a rollicking sense of humor, and after receiving a libretto by Arrigo Boito based on one of Shakespeare's most perishable farces, The Merry Wives of Windsor , he set about adapting a subject that would seem to have been alien to someone who had written so feelingly about revenge: the humiliation of the lovable old Elizabethan scoundrel Sir John Falstaff by a gaggle of silly, suburban matrons.

With astonishing resourcefulness for a man approaching 80, he gilded Boito's relentless buffoonery with his most richly mercurial score, producing an opera that is as easy to admire for its musical inventiveness as it is to resist for its emotional heartlessness. At least on opening night, the Met's production, which is a refurbishment of the Franco Zeffirelli staging at the old Met in 1964, seemed determined to bring out all the heartlessness it could.

Visually, the Zeffirelli production, whether it's in the half-timbered interior of the Garter Inn or Ford's sunlit garden, remains serviceably picturesque. But Falstaff , with its torrential flow of dialogue, declamations and ensembles, requires a director's deft touch in myriad ways if it is not to come across as a strenuous exercise in tomfoolery. Mr. Zeffirelli chose to stay in Italy and leave the hands-on work to assistants-and it showed.

Falstaff's thieving sidekicks, Bardolph (Jean-Paul Fouchécourt) and Pistol (Raymond Aceto), were stock ruffians. The lovers, Nannetta (Camilla Tilling in a gorgeous Met debut) and Fenton (a sweet but underpowered Gergory Turay), cut good-looking figures but seemed weirdly disconnected from each other. Dwayne Croft's Ford was another of this fine baritone's woodenly grandiloquent performances; and the three merry wives (Marina Mescheriakova's vocally insecure Alice Ford, Stephanie Blythe's richly eloquent Mrs. Quickly, and Susanne Mentzer's wackily unfocused Meg Page) seemed so competitive in their mugging and mincing that a friend was moved to remark that they should be called the hysterical wives of Windsor.

Musically, the greatest glory of Falstaff is its orchestra writing, which assumes a brilliant theatrical life of its own. In the booklet for an excellent new recording of the opera on Deutsche Grammophon, the conductor, Claudio Abbado, writes that "the orchestra itself seem to be laughing." Under the direction of James Levine, the Met's orchestra more often seemed to be grimacing; every interjection by the woodwinds or the cellos was like something out of Shakespeare for Dummies , and what should have sparkled thundered. Mr. Levine's sense of comic pacing is sometimes elephantine-his Meistersinger last fall was painfully slow-and on opening night this fleetest of operas moved with a remorseless tread. (Most infuriatingly, the Met, with its customary lack of concern for one's bedtime, stretched what should have been a delightfully swift evening-the opera itself runs a little less than two hours-into an interminable one that lasted nearly three and a half hours, thanks to two endless intermissions and protracted pauses for scene changes in Acts II and III. Are ordinary operagoers being made to suffer for the indulgence of the patrons lingering over mediocre, excessively priced food in the Grand Tier Restaurant?)

Fortunately, there was Mr. Terfel. A few days earlier, I had heard the strapping Welsh bass-baritone in a recital at Carnegie Hall, where I was struck anew not only by his familiar rugby-player-next-door charm, but by his voracious musical intelligence. Beautifully accompanied by his longtime pianist Malcolm Martineau, Mr. Terfel strode from Schubert to Vaughan Williams, Duparc, Copland and the young American composer Jake Heggie (the American premiere of a rather wan cycle of Vachel Lindsay poems entitled The Moon Is a Mirror ) with an easy intensity appropriate to each composer and a range of vocal colors that could turn from terror to tenderness in a single breath. Hearing Mr. Terfel as nothing but himself is terrific entertainment; hearing him as the Shakespearean rogue knight is great theater.

Verdi and Boito shrewdly chose to incorporate the more resonant Falstaff of Henry V into their adaptation, and no performer in my memory traces the character's journey from the titanic hedonism of Act I to the self-delusions of Act II to the vulnerability of Act III more powerfully than Mr. Terfel. Not even his outsize tummy prevents him from prowling the stage like a ferociously territorial fox. (Watch that foot dart forward in the first scene when he trips Pistol into a pratfall.) As the prospect of winning the heart of Alice Ford dawns on him, Mr. Terfel manages to radiate both a palpable glow and, more subtly, the sense that he is having doubts about whether he's really up to a roll in the hay. His most telling stroke comes at the beginning of Act III. Having been unceremoniously dumped into the Thames in a basket of dirty linen, he is seen climbing laboriously out of the orchestra pit. As Mr. Terfel hauled his prodigious bulk onto the stage, you felt that he was spending every last ounce of himself. When he sang of the unfathomable wound to his pride, he seemed as small as a whipped child. But as he realized that he was back outside the good old Garter, with its ready supply of wine, you could feel the life force seeping back into him, until he was once again Jack Falstaff-still unconscionably outrageous, but now, like Lear, a little wiser.

In all the talk about how to rebuild in the rubble of the World Trade Center, how to restore Wall Street's confidence in the economy and how, in general, to revive our faith in a brighter tomorrow, I have a suggestion: Pay heed to what's happening in our opera houses. After the New York City Opera was obliged to cancel its opening-night performance of The Flying Dutchman on the day of the terrorist attacks, the company bravely raised its curtain four days later, and it hasn't stopped since. On the following weekend, the Met injected a dose of opera power into the city's streets with a benefit preview of its opening-night Verdi gala that was shown on a big screen in Lincoln Center's plaza for thousands of passers-by. In Chicago, the Lyric Opera opened on schedule with an Otello of exceptional force. During the three opera performances that I attended over the past week or so, the passionate discipline of the sort of people who have made American opera so vital in recent years took on a heroic cast.

Perhaps the brightest indication of a healthy future, operatically speaking, was Ben Heppner's stage debut in Chicago in the most demanding tenor assignment in the Italian repertory, the title role of Verdi's Otello . In the past 20 years, the tragic Moor has been so fully inhabited by Plácido Domingo that it has seemed foolhardy for any other tenor to even think about it. On opening night, Mr. Heppner, who is the leading Tristan and Lohengrin of the day, was as moving an Otello as I have seen. His gleaming, bell-like timbre has always carried a wound in it; its straining for volume is tinged with an inborn anguish. A man of Bunyanesque heft, Mr. Heppner comes across as the most vulnerable of big men, a slightly lost giant. All these qualities were put to riveting use in a production by Sir

Peter Hall that made up in dramatic intimacy what it lacked in visual allure.

Rather than the overwhelming opulence one sees in the Met's staging, the Hall production employed a set more appropriate to the play's setting in its evocation of a somewhat rickety garrison in Cyprus. Yet the action was pointlessly updated to some vague period centuries later than the Venetian Renaissance of Shakespeare's imagination. Otello's soldiers were outfitted for the Battle of Waterloo and the ladies were dressed Empire-style, as if for a sitting with Ingres. If the events of the past several weeks have taught us the error of our indifference to historical understanding, I hope that directors will temper their misguided enthusiasm for transporting operas out of their original settings into a more familiar period that only confuses matters.

An Italian baritone of considerable swagger named Lucio Gallo made a crudely effective, if rather monochromatic Iago, but Sir Peter's work with the other two principals was stunning. Renée Fleming's Desdemona has grown over the years into one of her most richly detailed characters. At the start of her career, Ms. Fleming was a somewhat diffident actress who relied on the ravishing beauty of her voice to express emotion, without much resort to the telling physical gesture. In Chicago, she allowed all of her natural warmth and femininity to come through, not as a girlish pawn in Iago's schemes but as a burgeoning woman who literally finds herself, as she goes from yielding trust to self-protective anger to uncomprehending fear, with an ever-deepening hold on her own integrity. In the production's most remarkable bit of invention, she was hurled to the floor and nearly raped by her towering husband, whom she fended off with a series of kicks before regaining her feet and fleeing the stage; all of this she accomplished without sacrificing an ounce of vocal power. In her great "Ave Maria," she seemed to be praying for the whole world's salvation, as she inflected one of Verdi's most beneficent melodies with a wealth of caressing color.

The mood at the Met two nights later was somber: Among the women, bare skin and glitter were the exception; among the men, a preference for dark suits over black tie. But there was a standing ovation for Mayor Giuliani's before-the-curtain speech, in which he thanked the Met for having raised $2.1 million for the World Trade Center victims at the preview performance. And once the singing got underway, the evening turned out to be one of the Met's most agreeable opening nights in years.

To celebrate the centennial of Verdi's death, the program was devoted to three acts of three of his operas, a guarantee that the sum would be less than the parts. The decision to begin with Act I of Un Ballo in Maschera was unwise. This is an opera that is slow to accumulate, and though the first act is laden with hit tunes, nothing much happens of dramatic interest. Still, there was much to cheer in the exuberant Riccardo of the Met's lately returned prodigal son, Neil Shicoff, and in the Ulrica of the Russian mezzo-

soprano Larissa Diadkova, who sang the fortuneteller's dire incantations with lurid conviction. The third act of Otello produced the evening's high point (and secondstandingovation):Mr. Domingo's well-patented but still magnificent reading of his signature role, which he delivered with a clarion strength that was remarkable even for him. The evening ended with the third act of Rigoletto , in which the real excitement came, unexpectedly, from the two villains of the piece. Although the act's central business concerns the callowness of the Duke (nicely sung by Roberto Aronica) and the impending disaster that will befall Rigoletto and Gilda (ably performed by Franz Grundheber and Hei-Kyung Hong), I found myself far more interestedinthewickedallureofSergei Koptchak's Sparafucile and Daniela Barcellona's Maddalena. With evil so much in the air these days, it is perhaps inevitable that one pays greater attention to characters with murder on their minds.

The night after the Met's opening, I attended the first performance of City Opera's new production of a Bellini rarity, I Capuleti ei Montecchi , which is loosely derived from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Although I found much to deplore in yet another updated staging-for no discernible reason, old Verona became a never-never land of John Ford skies and turn-of-the century Merchant-Ivory whimsy-the plight of the two star-crossed lovers was gripping. As Giuletta, the fast-rising young American coloratura soprano Mary Dunleavy made her strongest showing to date, tossing off the role's bel canto by-the-yard challenges with crystalline accuracy and unflagging urgency. Even better in the less showy role of Romeo was Sarah Connolly, a young British mezzo-soprano who is new to me. Cutting a remarkably persuasive figure as a handsome, lanky youth, she sang with an unusual purity of line and a consistent richness of sound in a part that demands a daunting vocal range. In a time of fearful uncertainty, how good it feels to encounter brilliant young talent that promises to give so much pleasure in the years ahead.

Since the death of Leonard Bernstein in 1990, there has been considerable lamentation about the vacuum in our musical life created by the departure of that protean figure. And yet Lenny's successor has been with us all along in the roly-poly life force that is James Levine. The comparison is interestingly inexact: Mr. Levine, unlike his predecessor, is neither a composer nor a lecturer, only a musical performer. Unlike Bernstein, he is not a public figure: no television persona, no foot on Broadway, no Black Panther parties, no omnipresent swirl. An intensely private person, he is as guarded as Bernstein was porous. Scurrilous rumors about Wildean leanings have surfaced over the years and gone completely unsubstantiated, despite the best efforts of our most high-minded news organs (Time, The New York Times) to get to the bottom of them. More recent rumors about Mr. Levine-does he have Parkinson's disease? Is he about to be named the next music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra?-have been similarly defeated by the man's unsinkable presence. In New York's musical life, he is our Rock of Gibraltar.

Onstage, Bernstein was the great enactor, showing the audience how to feel the music along with him; Mr. Levine is the great enabler, a mop-headed coachman of minimal body language whose feelings about the music are unreadable. Offstage, Bernstein was the maestro in a cape; Mr. Levine is the maestro with a towel over one shoulder. Like Lenny, however, Jimmy (as he is called by his associates) has taken what was once a good, if highly erratic orchestra and turned it into a consistently great one. The Met's productions may be highly variable, the casts not always evenly top-notch, but one thing that Met-goers have been able to count on since Mr. Levine's appointment as music director in 1976 is the ravishing solidity of the orchestra. Thanks to a superb array of first-chair players, the solo parts are invariably heard with lyrical expressiveness. The balance between sections is exemplary. The dramatic line of the opera-even when it becomes as dangerously attenuated as it did in the recent Parsifal-is always palpable and never slack. This is an orchestra that is not only a pleasure to listen to, but also one that feels intimately caught up with what's happening onstage. Mr. Levine understands that opera is, above all, hot-blooded, and the brilliant warmth of his approach yields particularly rich dividends in the composers he does best: Verdi, Wagner and Berg. A Levine performance of even the hoariest work never seems shrouded in mist: From the moment he gives the first downbeat, we are brought face-to-face with the music, such that it becomes the central "character" of the night.

But there are some cracks in the mirror. Mr. Levine's boundless helmsmanship has meant that we have been graced with very few appearances by other maestros of comparable ability. Too often, when the Met's podium is occupied by a visiting conductor, the orchestra can sound merely slick and uninspired. Moreover, even Mr. Levine can be too much of a good thing: By now, his sure grip of the great masterpieces, though rewarding, has become predictable-at least to Met junkies like me. It has been too long since our ears were amazed by the likes of Carlos Kleiber, whose revelatory Der Rosenkavalier remains a touchstone of Strauss conducting in my memory. And is Mr. Levine's understandable delight in his great ensemble in need of tempering? I have heard more than a few former Met stalwarts complain that their careers were shortened thanks to their efforts to be heard above the full-throttle sound he routinely leads the Met Orchestra to produce. In the final two performances of Mr. Levine's marathon run a few weeks ago, he pushed the soloists to their limits, with results that were both glorious and punishing.

Certainly, I won't forget the overwhelming sonic adventure that he made of Verdi's Requiem. This greatest of Verdi's works, the distillation of all that the composer knew about music's capacity to evoke awe and sorrow, terror and tenderness, is mother's milk to Mr. Levine. He marshaled his hugely populated orchestra and chorus with an Achillean virtuosity that was, literally, breathtaking. But the four soloists, whose voices must deliver those incomparable melodies over the mighty clamor, had, in some instances, a less happy time of it. The soprano Renée Fleming produced her usual supply of gloriously arcing notes, but the writing calls for the heft of a dramatic, or at least a spinto, soprano, and when it wasn't soaring, Ms. Fleming's voice-which can best be described as opulent and lyric-had difficulty being heard with consistency, particularly in the closing "Libera Me." (The next day, it was revealed that she had been singing through a bout of tonsillitis.) Marcello Giordani, who has perhaps the finest Verdian top of any of today's tenors, was also obliged to push himself and, especially in the middle register, his tone lost point and definition. The juggernaut bass of René Pape could bring down the walls of Jericho, but even he indulged in some rote bellowing in order to make his full presence felt. Which left only one singer, the great Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, to carry the honors with complete comfort. Hers is an astonishingly rich, secure instrument from bottom to top, and it's a voice that always seems to have more in it than even the singer can use. In this respect, she is fully Mr. Levine's match, and when she cut through the orchestral tumult without the slightest hint of strain, a smile broke out on the maestro's cherubic face-the smile of a man at the top of his game.

Not to worry. I made the trek out to Cooperstown on the second weekend in July, and on the basis of the first two productions-Verdi's Falstaff and Puccini's Tosca -I can report that the "Glyndebourne of America," as Glimmerglass has been dubbed, is in as good, if not better, shape than it has ever been. I don't know of too many other small opera companies that could survive the last-minute loss of the baritone who was to sing Sir John Falstaff and the tenor who was slated for Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca , but Glimmerglass has become such a prime proving ground for America's best young singers that the emergency was handled with dispatch.

Certainly, the Falstaff of Mark Delavan, who joined the cast just two weeks before rehearsals, promises fine things for this young American baritone. I had admired the open-door roominess of Mr. Delavan's voice-so reminiscent of the great American Verdian of the 40's and 50's, Leonard Warren-in the title role of last season's Macbeth at City Opera, but had found his acting a bit blocky and unshaded (or perhaps too shaded, given the fact that he was up against the take-no-prisoners Lady Macbeth of Lauren Flanigan). The antihero of Verdi's final opera, which fuses the cunning Falstaff of Henry IV with that of the grand sybarite who gets his comeuppance in The Merry Wives of Windsor , can easily degenerate into a generic buffoon-a wearisome dirty old man. Mr. Delavan's Sir John, all done up in splendid disarray, was richly imposing but never merely grotesque-a bull who threatened, but never succeeded, in demolishing the intricate clockwork of this most delicate of operatic romps.

Indeed, Leon Major's production, with sets and costumes by John Conklin, is one of the cleanest, most fluent stagings of Verdi's last will and testament that I have ever seen. Falstaff is not an opera that encourages "revisionist" interpretation. As with the other two members of opera's trinity of comic masterpieces, The Marriage of Figaro and Die Meistersinger , all of its parts are so thoroughly integrated into the whole as to defy tampering with. All Falstaff needs is to be presented -clearly, deftly and with immense affection. Mr. Major, the artistic director of Boston Lyric Opera, must have had Falstaff in his bones for a very long time, for his coordination of the very busy goings-on in and around the Garter Inn-the posturings and plottings, the maskings and unmaskings, the furtiveness and ardor-is absolutely seamless, as inevitable and logical as the most naturally surreal Buster Keaton comedy. About Mr. Conklin's stage designs I have nothing to say except that they are utterly appropriate-picturesquely cluttered where clutter is the essence of things (Sir John's debauched lair), elegantly simple where elegant simplicity is required (Fenton's moonstruck aria).

Falstaff , perhaps more than any other opera, rises or falls on the alertness of its ensemble, both onstage and in the pit. Listening to the exquisitely pell-mell effects that George Manahan, the conductor, achieved with his forces, I felt I was in the presence of a seeing-eye cat. Mr. Manahan's intelligence seemed to be everywhere at once in this Halley's comet of a score-not by pushing it or pulling it along, but by pouncing on its every felicity so tellingly that each flash of melody played its just part in the continuous, magical flow. Among the evenly superb cast, I was especially taken with the robust Ford of Stephen Powell and the vivacious Alice of Amy Burton, who more than fulfilled Verdi's injunction that she be played as though she has "the devil in her."

The fact that the pivotal role of Baron Scarpia in Tosca was a colorless, stock Italian baritone named Michele Bianchini did not, surprisingly enough, lessen the visceral power of Mark Lamos' new production of Puccini's pulpy study of sexual cruelty. With his customary facility for getting to the essence of things and bringing them out with stylish vividness, Mr. Lamos has updated the story's lurid events to Mussolini's time, with a minimal set, by Michael Yeargan, featuring an overhanging, malevolent cross that would not be inappropriate for a new S&M club in Chelsea. At the Sunday matinee I attended, Glimmerglass' music director, Stewart Robertson, drew an unusually charged performance from the young musicians in the pit, one that was unblushing in both bombast and tremulousness.

And if the last-minute Mario Cavaradossi of Ian DeNolfo was as woefully short on any sense of a musically shaped line as he was long on a genuine tenorial ring, that didn't matter much. Tosca succeeds or fails largely on the strength of its leading lady, and in Amy Johnson, a City Opera stalwart to whom I have not paid enough attention, it has a stunner. Dressed magnificently, by Constance Hoffman, in floppy hats and soigné , 30's-style deco dresses out of a Tamara de Lempicka portrait, Ms. Johnson, who possesses a beautifully pointed soprano, was as alluring a Tosca as I have seen since the last days of Maria Callas at the old Met. Coiled yet fluid, vulnerable yet implacable, she would, in the old days, have been swept off to Hollywood by the likes of Josef von Sternberg. Fortunately, she is being swept off to the City Opera's mounting of this Tosca at the New York State Theater in September, where she is certain to bring down the house.