Honorary Chair Mo'Nique. Photo by Dario Calmese

With the holidays fast approaching, nothing brings us pirouetting into the snowflake season quite like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). At Wednesday’s Opening Night Gala, the limbs were flying around the stage with unfettered aplomb, flitting from grace to gusto whilst set to solos from the company’s A-List pals Anika Noni Rose, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Jessye Norman.

Now in its 54th year, the group’s rich cultural history was made evident throughout the selection of pieces performed throughout the evening, in particular Revelations, which was initially choreographed by Mr. Ailey himself. The piece had a special significance for Ms. Noni Rose, who told The Observer: “The AAADT was the first ballet that I saw, and Revelations was the piece that stuck in my mind so strongly. So it was a huge honor to be asked to perform here tonight - it was like the circle closed for me.”

The opening was also something of a landmark for dancer Renee Robinson, who was hand-picked by the company’s namesake some 32 years ago. Ms. Robinson is hanging up her dancing shoes this Christmas – for the AAADT at least. Speaking of her three decades with the company, she said, “What feels great is not only that I was chosen by Mr. Ailey, but that I had the opportunity to work under him and hear him speak about his vision and his legacy.”

“Over the years, the changes that have happened within the company have stemmed from the wonderful seed Ailey planted, and that’s what keeps it alive, current and important to society all over the world,” she continued. The only dancer to work under all three of the AAADT’s artistic directors (Mr. Ailey, Judith Jamison and Robert Battle, who currently holds the post), there is no denying that Ms. Robinson knows what the job entails better than anyone. So has she become a mother hen-type figure to the dancers finding their feet in the company? “Oh no,” she laughed, “I’m more like the fun aunt!”

Fun was certainly had by all throughout the evening, from the standing ovation at the performance’s close to hundreds of guests hitting the Hilton’s dance floor for some Beyoncé-esque booty-shaking before the meal began. Academy Award winner and stand-up comic Mo’Nique had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand during a speech mid-show, and continued to bolster the party atmosphere as the event went on. A long-time AAADT supporter, she told us, “Whenever the group would come to whatever city I was living in at the time, me and my family would go out and see them, and you just felt every movement and every step, every lyric, you felt everything they put into their performances. So when they called and asked me to be involved tonight, it was like – ‘For real? Of course!,’” she enthused.

Widespread involvement in the event was key, with a sublime number in the first half of the show causing quite the stir. As the stern looking company made their way into the audience, apparently selecting ball-gown toting spectators at random, things appeared to be far slicker by the time they reached the stage. Seamlessly moving from the roles of confused audience members to pro-shakers, this additional cast proved that age and physique don’t stand in front of a real dancer’s ability to move, and the piece was precisely the effervescent exhibition of skill that the AAADT has become renowned for.

The dancing continued well into the night, with gala guests evidently inspired by what they had seen earlier on stage. With a jazz band on hand to bust out everybody’s favorite Motown tunes, and the hotel's ballroom decorated like a sparkly winter wonderland, the AAADT brought a slice of Christmassy cheer to New York in a celebration of which Mr. Ailey himself would’ve undoubtedly been proud.

Compared to the German composer's 15-hour extravaganza, which has been more or less continuously on view for more than a century, Les Troyens is a breeze. Unlike Wagner, Berlioz was a master of compression along the lines of his neo-classical idol, Gluck. Rather than indulging in long stretches of musically inflected exposition, Wagner style, Berlioz filled in the narrative blanks with swatches of pure melody and orchestral color that speak directly to the listener's nerve endings and imagination. The Délacroix of composers, he possessed an affinity for mythic expression that can make Wagner's efforts in the same vein seem grandiose. Berlioz's only agenda was aesthetic, not political (he resisted the Wagnerites' attempts to make him a flag-waver for their hero's radicalism), and for all his considerable influence on later French and Russian Romantics, he has remained pretty much a maverick, more known about than listened to.

If a new staging of Les Troyens is no longer a rarity (I have seen four productions in the last 20 years), it's still an event, and in this current climate of free fall at the Met box office, the decision of general manager Joseph Volpe to go ahead with what is hardly a sure-fire crowd-pleaser is audacious. Moreover, for Mr. Volpe to turn the production over to Francesca Zambello, whose only previous Met outing was the disastrous Lucia di Lammermoor of 1992, struck many as downright reckless. Judging from what I heard and saw on opening night, the gamble has in good measure paid off.

The first thing to be said about this Troyens , which kicks off a celebration of the composer's bicentennial (Lincoln Center's homage, "Fantastic Voyages," begins in early March), is that, unlike the Met's previous production, this one moves. Fabrizio Melano's 1973 staging, which I saw in a slightly reworked 1983 revival for Jessye Norman, was majestic but cold, reducing the heroic principals to shadows in a world of ponderous gloom that was contradictory in spirit to the score's Mediterranean fire. If Ms. Norman, who sang Cassandra and Dido on different nights, was a pillar of alluring vocal strength, she was still just a pillar. From the electrifying opening bars, when the trumpets and bassoons skitter nervously up the scale to introduce the deluded, jubilant Trojans as they celebrate the end of the long Greek siege, Ms. Zambello propelled the Met's not always sure-footed chorus around the stage as though they were extras in De Mille's Ben-Hur . As the choristers dashed to and fro, came together in mass huddles, lifted children overhead and passed them around, or shook their hands wildly in the air, they seemed hell-bent on outstripping Berlioz's music for sheer excitability. Behind me, a man who picked up the gospel vibes whispered, "Lordy, lordy."

Over the course of the next five hours, Ms. Zambello kept things jumping in a set designed by the late Maria Bjornson, which multi-tasked cleverly as a bleak encampment outside Troy, an amphitheater in sunny Carthage, and a vision of the future Pantheon in Aeneas' last port of call. (The canny lighting was by James Ingalls.)

A Trojan horse (clearly too small to hold more than a handful of Greeks) sailed by, contrary to the composer's stage instructions; furtive side-plots developed among ancillary characters; the two lovers went airborne during their moment of consummation; Carthaginians, in cult-like white tunics and pants, marched around bearing all manner of utopian handiwork; the young sailor Hylas delivered his homesick aria on a swing that whisked him offstage before he was finished; dancers executed Doug Varone's flavorless ballet divertissements with calisthenic energy. If much of it was eye-catching (the ballets were eye-closing), it was sometimes incoherent, suggesting that either the highly intelligent Ms. Zambello hadn't had enough time to edit out the distracting bits or else hadn't trusted in Berlioz's endlessly resourceful score to convey what, purely on a musical level, is one of the most vividly etched stories in opera. She couldn't even leave well enough alone in the sublime love duet that closes Act IV, cluttering a stage that should belong solely to Dido and Aeneas with slumbering Carthaginians who had no reason not to be home in their own beds.

The Met gave Ms. Zambello a cast that, on paper, could scarcely be better. On opening night, however, their efforts were variable. Deborah Voigt, the Cassandra of the first two acts, has all the vocal glamour anyone could ask for; all sunny aplomb as usual, she was utterly lacking in the visionary madness and desperate passion essential to the tragic seer. As Aeneas, Ben Heppner, who was returning to the Met after a vocal collapse in last year's Die Meistersinger , had-astoundingly-shed 90 pounds and was virtually unrecognizable. That he cracked on a couple of high notes during his tortuous Act V aria was, given his year off, understandable; more worrisome was what, from my less-than-ideal seat under the overhang at the back of the auditorium, I heard as a loss of intensity, especially in the middle chest-voice range. Would this wonderful tenor, I wondered, ever give us another glorious Tristan?

Standouts among the well-chosen supporting singers were two young high tenors, Matthew Polenzani as the poet Iopas and Gregory Turay as Hylas. Mr. Polenzani, in particular, has a trueness of intonation and an elegance of line that recall the legendary French tenor George Thill. The Met chorus was loud but unmoving; James Levine conducted efficiently, but without consistent sensitivity to the strange colors that give Berlioz's world its distinctive, slightly elusive character.

The triumph of the evening was Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Dido. To her second-and first Romantic-role at the Met (she was a memorable Myrtle in John Harbison's The Great Gatsby ), she brought the sense of sheer truthfulness that has so distinguished her appearances in Baroque opera and on the recital stage.

Perhaps not since Janet Baker has there been a singer who connects to her listeners with so little vanity, such absence of rhetoric. Although she was completely believable as the lovesick Queen, romantic abandon is not what Ms. Lieberson is all about. The singular pathos of her voice seems utterly unforced, almost innate to her-another quality that makes her an ideal heroine in this most noble of operas.