Meanwhile,theglitteringStra-vinskean vistas came and went, rigorously guided by Mr. Davis. At the end, the famous orgiastic crescendo gathered and, with the sounding of the final ecstatic chord, the whole orchestra let go with a collective whoop worthy of a victory goal in the World Cup. Putting down his baton, Mr. Davis smiled.

The L.S.O., which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year, has always been regarded as the bad boy of the five London orchestras. (Its history is the subject of a new book, Orchestra: The LSO, a Century of Triumphs and Turbulence , by Richard Morrison.) The orchestra was founded as Britain's first self-ruling symphonic institution, and its players, who choose their principal conductor and guest conductors, have been notorious for a snarkiness that has caused more than one eminent maestro to turn tail and run. (One was a young Simon Rattle, who was so bruised by a guest appearance that he refused to conduct the orchestra until a few years ago, when he made a happy return.) Musically, the L.S.O. developed a reputation for a glossy brilliance that could be as unforgiving as the London weather. I have followed the orchestra under such principal conductors as Claudio Abbado, André Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas, and in my experience, it has come fully into its own as one of the world's great ensembles only since 1996, when the players chose the deeply genial Sir Colin as their helmsman. If the L.S.O. has yet to forge a trademark "sound" as distinctive as the Cleveland's exquisite balance, the Berlin's overwhelming power or the Vienna's silky warmth, it may be unrivaled for something more valuable-a zestfulness of spirit that can lift the music right out of the concert hall.

This rambunctious band has seldom been more magnificent than it was several Sundays ago, when the orchestra gave a concert performance of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes . The work, which had its premiere at Sadler's Wells in 1945, established Britten, then 31, as one of the most formidable theatrical composers since Verdi. The title character, a violent-tempered fisherman who is demonized by his fellow villagers, is among the most complex protagonists in opera-equal parts victim, destroyer and visionary. Britten's first and greatest triumph, along with Berg's Wozzeck , Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Janácek's Jenufa , represents the pinnacle of operatic composition on a tragic scale in the last century, and its impact hasn't diminished with time. What Edmund Wilson wrote of the premiere nearly 60 years ago-"[the opera] seizes upon you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end"-could have been written of the performance I heard. The next day, a friend called to say that he had found himself weeping from start to finish. "Never before," he said, "have I been so aware of the sadness in every bar."

And never before was I made so aware of Peter Grimes as a masterpiece whose impact derives from an arrangement of musical and poetic detail that becomes Shakespearean in its richness. (The pungent libretto is by Montagu Slater, from a poem by George Crabbe.) Peter Grimes is an opera that works thrillingly when fully staged, and even more thrillingly when one is absolved from attending to quaint fisherfolk, tilted cottages and a craggy cliff. Britten's translucent score is visual and visceral on a level to make Wagner seem hazy. Its depiction of the nattering, narrow-minded village, boiling with the sort of communal dislike that only the English can muster, is Goyaesque. Its rendering of the vast, tumultuous ocean in the famous "Four Sea Interludes" is Turneresque in its terrifying splendor-waves heaving, the "tide that waits for no man" rising and falling, gulls shrieking, salt air stinging. Grimes' soaring lyric eruptions ("Now the Great Bear and Pleiades where earth moves / Are drawing up the clouds of human grief ..."), underscored by dark, lush strings, strain for transcendence like Blake's Adam.

Mr. Davis' association with Peter Grimes goes back many years. He made his American operatic debut with the work, conducting it at the Met in 1967 with Jon Vickers in the title role, and he and that great tenor recorded the opera in 1978-a performance that remains unmatched in its projection of violence. (By contrast, the "definitive" 1958 recording, with Britten conducting and Sir Peter Pears as Grimes, seems restrained.) Colleagues of Mr. Davis tell me that his great passion apart from music is weaving, and his mastery of that craft was manifest in the way he brought out the score's myriad subtleties without losing sight of the larger tapestry that was unfolding.

His musicians and singers were superb. The chorus in Peter Grimes occupies the foreground in its progress from church congregation to lynch mob, and the members of London Symphony Chorus brought this crucial "character" menacingly alive. (They supplied the performance's one brilliant theatrical touch by turning their backs to Mr. Davis during Grimes' monologue of despair in Act III, such that their shouting of his name sounded like ricocheting echoes inside his mad head.) All the minor characters-the officious lawyer Swallow, the busybody Mrs. Sedley, the Rector Adams, the tavernkeeper Auntie and so on-had a Dickensian vividness that stopped short of caricature. Janice Watson's singing of Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress who is Grimes' only hope for salvation, was sweetly steadfast. Anthony Michaels-Moore was robust-if perhaps a shade too elegant-as Balstrode, the canny, retired seaman.

Grimes was sung by a burly Australian tenor, Glenn Winslade. There was a good deal of grumbling, both during the intermissions and later, about his wobbling in several of the part's cruelly exposed high passages (apparently Mr. Winslade had arrived in New York with a froggy throat). But those moments did not diminish what, for me, was a true and moving performance. Mr. Winslade may have lacked the demonic intensity of Jon Vickers, but he brought out Grimes the poetic dreamer with a lyricism that was heartbreaking.

A few days later, after the Firebird rehearsal, I chatted with Mr. Davis and asked him what he thought was the secret behind the L.S.O.'s vivacity. "They're virtuoso instrumentalists who really listen to each other," he said. "They know how to give each other space. And they never play anything twice the same way." He paused for a moment, then smiled and said something that I have never heard a maestro say about his unruly troops: "There's something very free about these people," he said approvingly.

Although there is much to be said for the current creative partnership of Glimmerglass Opera and City Opera, one of its

unfortunate consequences is that productions which looked so vibrant in the intimate confines of Cooperstown, N.Y., have tended to get a bit lost in the opera-unfriendly expanse of the New York State Theater. Way out there on the shores of Lake Otsego, Rhoda Levine's delicately claustrophobic production of Lizzie Borden had a theatrical intensity that swept aside my reservations about the Hollywood modernism of Mr. Beeson's 1965 score and the Playhouse 90 squareness of Kenward Elmslie's libretto. Thanks to the production's bleak but pure clapboard setting, by John Conklin, and its committed, understated cast, led by Phyllis Pancella in the title role, I found myself not only drawn into the unlikely suspense of a story whose ending was a foregone conclusion but feeling nostalgic for that time, three decades ago, when genuine American opera seemed like such a promising new genre.

All those ingredients and more came to the State Theater-the more being the presence of City Opera's adroit music director, George Manahan, in the pit and the powerhouse soprano Lauren Flanigan as the dreadful stepmother. Mr. Conklin's frozen Hopper set and Ms. Pancella's volcanic Lizzie were as impressive as before, but projected into the State Theater's wide, arid valley, the voices sounded distant and passionless. Perhaps because I was hearing the opera for a second time, I found Mr. Beeson's music, which seemed to come both from everywhere and nowhere, depressingly inadequate to the events on stage, and the harsh reductiveness of Mr. Elmslie's libretto less simple than simple-minded. Once again I wondered, as I so often do at City Opera: With all this Big Money floating around town these days, can't some of it be pooled to build this valiantly revitalized, seriously needed company a new house of, say, 1,500 to 1,800 seats, designed strictly for opera?

The Met is a real opera house, but it's not the house for everything, and I had grave doubts about how well Carlisle Floyd's only marginally elevated folk-opera would carry in the vastness behind the Chagalls. But Susannah , even more than the most celebrated American opera, Porgy and Bess , has traveled remarkably well. (It had its premiere in 1955.) Thanks to its composer's canny blending of the plot-driven mechanics of Italian verismo opera (think I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana ) and the sure-fire theme of bigotry versus nonconformism (think Peter Grimes ), Susannah has an easygoing lyricism that doesn't tax the ear harmonically, stays resolutely behind the action (not on top of it, as in Verdi or Wagner) and pauses at strategic moments to let the leading singers show off their voices.

On its own exceedingly limited terms, Susannah is, as they say, a completely realized work (Mr. Floyd also wrote the libretto). Which is not to say that its demands are slight. Vocally, the non-American work it most resembles (though not in length) is Madama Butterfly , requiring in its leading roles a full-bodied, long-floating soprano voice for its ripe, 18-year-old heroine, a robust bass-baritone for its charismatic but weak-willed Rev. Olin Blitch, and a plangent, Pinkerton-like tenor for the heroine's wayward but stalwart brother, Sam.

For this Susannah , the Met went to its A-list. Although the ripe-figured, ripe-voiced Renée Fleming can hardly pass for an ingenue, she exploited her well-honed wide-eyed sweetness to maximum effect, while employing the fabulous Sarah Vaughan-like colors in her sun-streaked soprano to bring out Susannah's more than nascent sexuality. Her two set-piece arias-"Ain't it a pretty night?" and "The trees on the mountains"-were, in the best Broadway sense of the word, showstoppers.

Jerry Hadley also commands more than the usual share of well-honed innocence, which he put to good use as a consistently appealing Sam Polk-though I got a little tired of the studied hokeyness of his Grand Ol' Opry twang. (Is it unkind of me to suggest that he start hitting the Stairmaster in preparation for his next big Met assignment as the not-so-innocent title character in John Harbison's new opera of The Great Gatsby ?)

Samuel Ramey's portrayal of Olin Blitch goes back at least as far as 1982, when I saw him in a City Opera revival of Susannah . Now that he is a good deal older and weirder , his fallen minister is tremendously potent, although during his air-clutching agonies of guilt I had the feeling that I was watching his death scene in Boris Godunov all over again.

On opening night, the conductor James Conlon seemed determined to give this Susannah the tragic grandeur of, say, La Forza del Destino , pumping up the orchestra's volume to levels that threatened to drown out even Ms. Fleming's richly furnished sound and did nothing to conceal the fact that Mr. Floyd's score, for all its well-learned theatrical effectiveness, is seldom more than fluent and tuneful. Unlike in Britten's Peter Grimes , for example, the music never enlarges on the drama, never takes us to places where the words can't go; instead, in the manner of a terrific Broadway score, it stays on the support level of decoration, embellishment, accompaniment.

Robert Falls' staging of the piece, using a set that could have been borrowed from an early production of Oklahoma! , was as clean and to the point as everything is in Susannah . To see it amid the Met's gaudy opulence was to experience the odd frisson of coming upon a Norman Rockwell in the Louvre. It all made for an entertaining no-brainer of an evening. For once, it was nice to see Americans singing and acting like Americans on the Met's stage. But a great contemporary opera Susannah ain't. For that, the Met, to my immense pleasure, has just brought back the real thing-another, far more powerful operatic tale of a social victim, Wozzeck .

Aside from featuring antiheroes who are responsible for the deaths of boys-Boris Godunov becomes the czar of 16th-century Russia by ordering the murder of the throne's rightful heir, and the brutality of the Suffolk fisherman Peter Grimes brings his apprentices to violent ends-the two operas might seem to have little in common. What could be farther apart than Mussorgsky's sweeping chronicle of Russian despotism, mass suffering and international intrigue, and Britten's microscopic view of English villagers whose smug conformity crushes a prickly, independent loner? And yet seeing these two works on successive nights was to be reminded that Boris and Peter , despite their having been written 70 years apart in countries as different as Russia and Britain, might be described as the fraternal twins-the Castor and Pollux-in the operatic pantheon.

Both operas are among the few genuine tragedies in the modern repertory, driven by protagonists whose blind willfulness ends in madness and who are beset by that rarest of operatic emotions: guilt. Also unusual is the prominence each of them gives to the chorus. In Boris , the despot's rise and fall is mirrored at every turn by the longings and despair of the Russian masses who swarm the stage. In Peter Grimes , the East Anglian fisherfolk transcend their seeming banality to become as terrifying to us as they are to the paranoid title character.

Musically, both operas owe much of their immediacy and depth to the ingenious use of popular musical idioms-hymns, ballads, anthems-that are enveloped and heightened by bold-stroked tone-painting in the orchestra, which becomes so vivid as to make scenery almost superfluous. The later opera- Grimes was written in 1945-occasionally echoes the earlier one in what can only have been a deliberate borrowing, as it were, on the part of Britten. The most notable instance of this is in the staccato rhythms and quirky figurations in the third Sea Interlude, which immediately recall the clamorous opening bars of Mussorgsky's Coronation Scene.

Both of the Met productions are old-the Boris dates from 1974, the Grimes from 1967-and the former has aged badly. From the opening scene outside the Monastery of Novodevichy, near Moscow, we are in a folkloric, Socialist Realism greeting card (St. Basil's onion dome dangles from a wire). Richly costumed, the creaky design would have been unexcitingly tolerable if there hadn't been so many gaffes and missed opportunities in the staging: a clock that refuses to cooperate with Boris' terrible forebodings about time; a fountain that blocks the Pretender Dimitri from view; nonsensical comings-and-goings at the scaffold in Kromy Forest; and, most damaging, a deployment of the chorus as nothing more than a huddled mass, with the result that these poor kulaks had all the presence of an offstage choir.

Fortunately, the musical level was very high. Valery Gergiev, the charismatic maestro from St. Petersburg who is the Met's new principal guest conductor, was in the pit and he brought out all the telling dramatic detail in yet another "new" orchestration-by one Igor Buketoff-of Mussorgsky's problematic score. Despite a tendency to peter out at the end of several scenes, Buketoff's labors struck me, on first hearing, as a plausible middle course between the sometimes crude starkness of the original version and the splashiness of Rimsky-Korsakov's subsequent embellishments. Mr. Gergiev was joined by stalwarts of his Kirov Opera, whose linguistic ease and familiarity with their roles lent a wonderful authenticity of speech and acting style. In a uniformly strong cast, the standouts were Olga Borodina's voluptuous, alarming Marina, Vladimir Galouzine's gleaming-toned Grigory, and Sergei Leiferkus' steely, scheming Rangoni.

In such company, the American Samuel Ramey seemed something of an interloper in the title role. Mr. Ramey's trim athleticism and darkly elastic bass-baritone made for an unusually lithe Boris-his final tumble from the throne was a marvel-but he is an actor of stock gestures, "effective" rather than interesting. His was a by-the-book Boris-for the most part, a closed book.

By contrast, his brother in antiheroism, the Peter Grimes of Philip Langridge, was magnificently realized. In a role that is as inviting to interpretation as King Lear, the haggardly handsome British tenor eschewed, on the one hand, the titanic explosiveness of a Jon Vickers and, on the other, the aura of lost nobility of an Anthony Rolfe Johnson. His tormented fisherman was a brooding, dangerous, yet strangely sympathetic outsider-Al Pacino in a peacoat. Mr. Langridge's singing had a non-operatic crooning quality as though he were singing to himself, and his body language-coiled, crouched, ready to spring-was riveting.

He was in excellent company. Carolyn James' Ellen Orford seemed a bit stolid at first, but with her bright, top-heavy soprano she warmed up and delivered a strong, sweet performance of the schoolmistress, the only gleam of light in this grim affair. Alan Opie's Balstrode was gruffly attractive, and the chorus of townspeople-many of whom had perhaps been part of that faceless Russian mass-took on vibrant life. For once at the Met, each of the choristers had a distinct, human identity. The conductor was the British maestro David Atherton, an old hand at Britten, and he and his forces attacked this hallucinatory score with such whoosh and bite and rhythmic crackle that we might have been listening to one of Duke Ellington's swinging Harlem suites. This was one of those nights at the Met when everything clicked to thrilling perfection, and it was dismaying to see the house half-full. Why are New Yorkers so allergic to the works of one of the century's two greatest opera composers? One solution to the Met's Britten Problem might be to lower the ticket prices for his prickly operas, to bring in a younger, more adventurous crowd.

The century's other supreme opera composer was, of course, Richard Strauss, and the Met's first new production of the spring season introduced Capriccio , the composer's last work for the stage, to the house repertory. Straussians love this 1942 "conversation piece" as the summing up of the great man's long career, revolving as it does around an intellectual debate on the subject of Words versus Music, peopled with many of the operatic types who graced his previous music-dramas, from wistful aristocrats to Italian singers to knowing servants, and dressed up in music that wittily incorporates in-jokes to other composers (Gluck, Verdi, etc.) as well as to Strauss himself. Strauss initially thought of the piece as a curtain-raiser to one of his last mythological operas, Daphne , but was persuaded by his co-librettist, the conductor Clemens Krauss, to expand it into an evening-length one-act.

Even with the Met's intermission, an opera that consists of two hours and 40 minutes of back-and-forth about an issue whose resolution is clear from the outset-in opera, of course, the sovereign element is music-can become awfully tedious. I, for one, have always wished that Strauss had stuck to his original intentions. The Met's production, which was supervised by John Cox, is a pretty-looking party, attended by a fine ensemble of well-schooled and handsome guests, led by Kiri Te Kanawa as the beautiful, widowed Countess, the muse who ignites the debate. With Andrew Davis conducting, Strauss' delicately "talky" music was extremely well served. But, God, how it dragged.

There is a trend to make operas more accessible by moving the time in which they were set closer, but not too close, to the present. I don't buy this: If you're going to "update," then why not go all the way and update into the here-and-now? How is sense improved by imposing yet another historical layer on what is already historically layered? By shifting the party in Capriccio from the French Enlightenment to a 1920's Parisian drawing room, the Met's production made all the arguing about the merits of 18th-century opera reforms sound silly. Why were these people babbling on about Gluck and Couperin when, to all appearances, they should have been talking about Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev?

Things were made murkier by the decision to remove all mirrors from the opulent drawing room. The tricky business of mirroring-of words and music, of art and life-is what Capriccio is fundamentally about. When Kiri Te Kanawa, looking splendid in sequins and singing with greater radiance than I have heard from her in years, addressed the subject in the Countess' glorious closing monologue, she did so not to the mirror that is called for in the stage directions but directly into the auditorium. In front of her was a fire screen, its purpose being, I can only guess, to suggest that the invisible mirror over the invisible fireplace was us-the audience-gazing back at her. It was a familiar and, I'm afraid, not terribly helpful conceit-more "context," I suppose.