Christopher Alden’s new production of Giovanni was the highlight of a long weekend marking the start of the company’s 2009-2010 season. Mr. Alden’s staging is morbid, sinister and darkly funny. In an open space that resembles a train-station waiting room, a place where people spend lots of time doing little, the chorus sits dumbly and the characters wander through their motions with eerie lethargy, their behaviors taking on the sad inevitability of compulsions.

In many ways, this Don Giovanni has every mark of a great City Opera production: a bold, interesting perspective on a repertory staple, cast with young, talented singers. (Six of the eight major parts are taken by singers making their City Opera debuts.) This is the way the company used to distinguish itself from the Met. Back in the late ’60s, City Opera had a daring Frank Corsaro Traviata featuring the attractive Patricia Brooks; the Met had a staid Alfred Lunt staging and the statuesque Montserrat Caballe.

But things have changed. Not only are the Met’s tickets now just as cheap as City Opera’s, but the singers are just as attractive, and the productions are just as stark and edgy. Mr. Alden’s spare, ominously surreal Giovanni resembles nothing so much as Willy Decker’s spare, ominously surreal Traviata, a production scheduled to come to the Met next season.

If the Met and City Opera offer the same product at the same price, it won’t be a surprise which company succeeds. City Opera’s only course of action is to offer a different product, a different repertoire. The company’s spring season—featuring Handel’s Partenope and Chabrier’s L’étoile—is a better example than fall’s of the choices it should make. Though George Steel faults it for being in its own way conservative, there was a reason that Gerard Mortier’s plan for the company resonated. It felt natural and exciting that City Opera would dedicate itself to operas that the Met does never (Einstein on the Beach, St. Francis of Assisi, Death in Venice) or rarely (The Rake’s Progress, The Makropulos Case, Pélleas et Mélisande).

This has, of course, always been City Opera’s way. The list of its American and New York premieres is extraordinary. The company’s commitment to completely new work has also been commendable. (But the results have been dismal: Of its 29 world premieres, precisely one—Copland’s The Tender Land—is done with any degree of frequency.) It is a commitment the company honored at its opening night on Saturday, a revival of its world premiere production of Hugo Weisgall’s Esther.

In his 1978 book Opera in the Twentieth Century, Ethan Mordden sums up Mr. Weisgall’s operatic output as “well-intentioned mediocrity.” The book was published well before Esther, but the description remains apt. The opera is long, dreary, ponderous and dimly lit. The libretto speaks in self-serious proclamations like “Why can I chart the course of empire but not the path of my own heart?” The projections of Ancient Near East reliefs that constitute the set are elegant enough, but the costumes scream The Ten Commandments. (It doesn’t help that Roy Cornelius Smith, playing the evil Haman, distinctly resembles Edward G. Robinson.)

The audience response Saturday night was warm but hardly tumultuous. The interesting question, then, is what has changed since the opera was so ecstatically received at its premiere 16 years ago.

There may be two answers—one aesthetic, one political. The premiere of Esther, on Oct. 8, 1993, came on the heels of two much-hyped world premieres at the Met: Philip Glass’ Columbus-themed The Voyage, in October 1992, and John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles, in December 1991. There was hardly a review that neglected either elaborate production’s cost (more than $2 million for Voyage and $3 million for Ghosts); next to those two, Esther’s projections must have been refreshingly clean and simple.

After Voyage and Ghosts, Mr. Weisgall’s music, too, may have been a welcome antidote. Depending on how you looked at it—and which Met production you were taking as your foil—Esther could be all things to all people, either admirably easy or admirably hard. Martin Bernheimer clearly had Mr. Glass in mind when he wrote, in his 1993 rave, that Esther “may strike those observers perched on the cutting edge of today’s most trendy isms as a bit old-fashioned. … One could hardly call it minimalistic in any sense.”

Edward Rothstein, in The Times, took on the grand-opera pastiche of Ghosts of Versailles, writing, “[At] a time when post-modernist taste is dominant and nostalgia and eclecticism rule, Mr. Weisgall’s uncompromising modernism … made a compelling case for difficult music used for difficult purposes.” Esther, in other words, was in the right place at the right time.

One other early-’90s opera that offers the most interesting comparison to Esther is John Adams’ Death of Klinghoffer. Like Esther, Klinghoffer is an opera about Jews. It tells the story of the 1984 hijacking of the ocean liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian extremists, who eventually killed one of their Jewish-American hostages. As might be expected, Mr. Adams’ weighing in on the fraught Middle East standoff met with considerable criticism. Opponents of the work objected to what they viewed as the humanization of the terrorists; performances in San Francisco in 1992 were picketed by Jewish groups, and, shortly afterward, a planned run of the opera in Los Angeles was canceled.

Esther received rather different treatment, to say the least. Mr. Adams was obviously wandering into more charged territory with an opera based on recent, as opposed to Biblical, events. But Esther, too, courts contemporary relevance, speaking, as the program notes say, “not only of the ancient Diaspora and the story of the Jewish freedom festival Purim, but also of the Holocaust and of the quest for a Jewish homeland in the 20th century.”

The difference is that the story Mr. Adams is telling is hard, challenging long-held assumptions about culpability and morality. Esther is ultimately much more cozy and self-congratulatory—and easier to stand up and applaud. In the opera, assimilation is bad; the search for a rigidly defined identity is good; and the Jews are eternal victims whose militarization is necessary for their survival “forever and ever.”

When Esther premiered in 1993, just a few weeks after the signing of the Oslo Accords and at a high point in Israel’s moral standing, the opera’s positing of armed self-defense as integral to the perpetuation of the Jewish people might have been stirring, and doubtless inspired some of those bravos and reviews. Today, in a very different world, it has a very different effect.

zwoolfe@observer.com

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

During a very long life (he died in 1999, at the age of 93), Sacher commissioned new works by Bartók, Stravinsky, Martin, Honegger and other notable modernists. Today, his legacy lives on in the Roche Commissions, which the company launched three years ago in partnership with the Lucerne Festival, Carnegie Hall and the Cleveland Orchestra. The third and most recent commission went to the Swiss composer Hanspeter Kyburz, whose catchily titled work for two singers and orchestra, touché, helped open Carnegie’s new season.

As the title suggests, touché is a musical duel—a 20-minute marital skirmish between a soprano and a tenor, accompanied by a symphony orchestra whose glittering exertions go way beyond the barbed, Beckett-like pillow talk. Mr. Kyburz, in keeping with many European composers of his generation (he’s 46), is an unabashed late modernist who grounds his compositions in formats that have more to do with higher mathematics than the vagaries of musical inspiration. Like his previous works, touché derives from a recipe of algorithms that the composer regards (according to his notes in the program) as “a metaphor for the things [the two characters] have failed to recognize and are subjected to.” In the old days, we called it “Fate.”

The program notes promise something more daunting than the performance delivers. Mr. Kyburz’s music is consistently engaging, emotionally evocative and beautifully put together—a witty, scary, sensuous fever chart of marital miscommunication. Alas, there’s also a libretto (written in English by the composer’s wife) to attend to. Mr. Kyburz and his wife have taken great pains to link the words and the music for sense, sound and rhythm, and it’s hard to imagine two more articulate fencing partners than the American soprano Laura Aiken and the English tenor John Mark Ainsley. Nonetheless, I found the text more distracting than illuminating, because the resources of the singers were so unequal to those of the orchestra.

Since the razor-edged precision of touché’s musical constructions clearly owes much to the composer’s computer, I wondered why he didn’t think of prerecording the singers and amplifying them into a more equal partnership with the orchestra. The live vocal performance of touché makes eavesdropping on the couple’s marital troubles too hard.

For all its built-in obstacles, this year’s Roche Commission was the most vibrant element in a somewhat bewildering patchwork of programs by the Clevelanders and their elegant young music director, Franz Welser-Möst, who is beginning his fifth season with the orchestra.

Opening night brought forth a surfeit of Viennese schlag: Bonbons by Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss bracketed an exquisitely played Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17, with the supremely buoyant Norwegian pianist Lief Ove Andsnes as soloist, and two familiar Mozart arias, sung with radiant intensity by the young German soprano Dorothea Roschmann, who was substituting for an indisposed Thomas Quasthoff.

On the second night, sandwiched between Dvorak’s loquaciously folkloric Symphony No. 5 and Debussy’s sonic blockbuster La Mer, Mr. Kyburz’s work was made to seem slighter than it is. The third program began with a delightful oddity, Messiaen’s Un Sourire—the composer’s faux-naïve, ornithological homage to “the smile” in Mozart’s music. This was followed by a trio of Mozart concert arias sung with robust panache by a recovered Thomas Quasthoff, who went on to treat the audience to an unaccompanied virtuoso jazz rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a demonstration of the singer’s astonishing three-octave range that brought down the house.

All this was a warm-up for the elephant in the wings: Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, one of the great epic curiosities of the 19th century—a work of blazing majesty and repetitiveness that has an opiate effect on Bruckner addicts and makes lesser mortals mutter to themselves, “Oh, no—not that again!”

I am, as I have written before, a Cleveland Orchestra addict, continually renewed by this great collective’s dedication to making the best music out of whatever it is they’re playing, be it a Strauss polka or an untested Roche Commission. Some of my critical colleagues temper their admiration of the orchestra’s vaunted power and perfectionism; they grumble that the results are occasionally a little too “restrained” or “refined”—that, as one of them puts it, “they never take me over the edge.”

To which I can only say that at a time when we’re subjected to so much persuasion by any means in our public life, the Clevelanders are a refreshing throwback to a more civilized age. Unlike some of their so-called peers among the world’s top-ranked symphonic ensembles, they never hector—they deliver; they never preen—they play.

Until now, I’d been a Bruckner skeptic. But at Carnegie the other night, all doubts vanished as, inexorably and gently, Mr. Welser-Möst and his band calmly opened the doors to this edifice of countless rooms and beckoned me inside. It was a wondrous place to be.

But for many, the real kickoff comes when the Metropolitan Opera opens on Sept. 25 with Madama Butterfly, directed by Anthony Minghella (of English Patient fame). The production, which employs Japanese puppets, was a smash hit at the English National Opera, and Met watchers are eager to see whether it heralds the sort of theatrical razzle-dazzle promised by the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb.

The other highlights of the Met’s season, which were put in place by Mr. Gelb’s predecessor, Joseph Volpe, include a new production of The Barber of Seville starring the heartthrob Rossini tenor Juan Diego Flórez (opening Nov. 10), and the world premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, with Plácido Domingo adding an Oriental potentate to his list-without-end of operatic heroes (Dec. 21).

The mighty Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, opens Carnegie Hall on Oct. 4 with a helter-skelter program of Mahler songs (with the German baritone Thomas Quasthoff), a Mozart piano concerto (with the Norwegian pianist Lief Ove Andsnes), and bonbons by waltz king Johann Strauss. The orchestra’s three-concert engagement also includes the New York premiere of touché, a new work by Hanspeter Kyburz; Mr. Quasthoff in Mozart concert arias; and the massive Bruckner Fifth Symphony.

Leading Carnegie’s usual parade of superstars is Daniel Barenboim, who’s appearing both as conductor (with the Vienna Philharmonic next spring) and as one of the world’s most probing pianists. On Oct. 9, he joins James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Schoenberg’s dizzying Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s rapturous Fourth Concerto. On Jan. 20 and 21, he returns to peruse the two books of preludes and fugues that constitute Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Only Carnegie could bring together the Olympian likes of Gidon Kremer and Krystian Zimerman, who will combine forces in Brahms’ sonatas for violin and piano (Nov. 1). Two nights later, the electrifying Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons arrives with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra for three programs of Strauss, Shostakovich, Wagner, Bartók and Beethoven.

If Carnegie has a house pianist, it’s the elegantly cerebral Pierre-Laurent Aimard. On Dec. 10, the French virtuoso appears with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the piano concerto of György Ligeti, in whose mischievous pyrotechnics Mr. Aimard is unexcelled. The following night, he will outdo himself in a program of 20 knuckle-busting études by everyone from Ligeti to Liszt.

A few blocks north at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic is offering perhaps the greatest diversity of programs in its 165-year history. They range from a somber celebration of the 100th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birthday, conducted by music director Lorin Maazel, (Sept. 28 to Oct. 3), to a rambunctious collaboration with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra that includes Duke Ellington’s Harlem transfer of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music (Dec. 6 to 9).

At Christmastime, the Messiah to beat is likely to be the Philharmonic’s version of Handel’s evergreen, with a stellar group of soloists that includes the great American mezzo Stephanie Blythe. The British conductor is that nimblest of Handelians, Harry Bicket. He’s part of an invasion of formidable guest conductors, including Esa-Pekka Salonen, who in the new year will lead the world premiere of his new piano concerto with Yefim Bronfman (Feb. 7, 2007).

On Oct. 7, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series opens with a bang: Bernard Haitink leading the London Symphony Orchestra in all nine Beethoven symphonies (it goes out without a whimper seven months later, when Avery Fisher Hall becomes the setting for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s multimedia staging of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, trendily retitled The Tristan Project by director Peter Sellars). The series is chockablock with living luminaries, but they may all be upstaged by a pianist who lives only on recordings and film—the late Glenn Gould, whose idiosyncratic brilliance can be sampled in a 10-film series at the Walter Reade Theater (Oct. 20 to Nov. 18).

On Nov. 2, 3 and 4 at the auditorium in John Jay College, Great Performers is celebrating Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with the composer’s politically tendentious extravaganza, The Cave. (In the new year, the enterprising Miller Theater will pay tribute to Mr. Reich with an all-percussion program that shows the minimalist master in a more congenial light.)

The dynamic new artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Finckel and Wu Han, are offering meaty musical conversations at the refurbished Alice Tully Hall, roaming around a single composer like Brahms (Oct. 20 to Nov. 7).

The Frick Collection has a long history of introducing musical titans-in-the-making to New York audiences, and insiders are already touting a young Russian Romantic pianist, Yevgeny Sudbin—who performs at the museum on Dec. 3—as the next Rubinstein.

When it comes to picking great pianists, however, no presenter has a better record than the Metropolitan Museum’s series of Concerts and Lectures. This season, the Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium plays host to a dazzling assortment of keyboard artists, ranging from the Austrian protégé of Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, to the venerable Czech poet, Ivan Moravec. The Met evening that every piano freak is salivating over is Oct. 26, when Ivo Pogorelich is scheduled to make his first New York appearance in a decade. Justly celebrated for musical unpredictability, the Yugoslav phenomenon is also renowned for his tendency not to show up at the appointed hour. We’ll see.

But for many, the real kickoff comes when the Metropolitan Opera opens on Sept. 25 with Madama Butterfly, directed by Anthony Minghella (of English Patient fame). The production, which employs Japanese puppets, was a smash hit at the English National Opera, and Met watchers are eager to see whether it heralds the sort of theatrical razzle-dazzle promised by the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb.

The other highlights of the Met’s season, which were put in place by Mr. Gelb’s predecessor, Joseph Volpe, include a new production of The Barber of Seville starring the heartthrob Rossini tenor Juan Diego Flórez (opening Nov. 10), and the world premiere of Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, with Plácido Domingo adding an Oriental potentate to his list-without-end of operatic heroes (Dec. 21).

The mighty Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, opens Carnegie Hall on Oct. 4 with a helter-skelter program of Mahler songs (with the German baritone Thomas Quasthoff), a Mozart piano concerto (with the Norwegian pianist Lief Ove Andsnes), and bonbons by waltz king Johann Strauss. The orchestra’s three-concert engagement also includes the New York premiere of touché, a new work by Hanspeter Kyburz; Mr. Quasthoff in Mozart concert arias; and the massive Bruckner Fifth Symphony.

Leading Carnegie’s usual parade of superstars is Daniel Barenboim, who’s appearing both as conductor (with the Vienna Philharmonic next spring) and as one of the world’s most probing pianists. On Oct. 9, he joins James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Schoenberg’s dizzying Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s rapturous Fourth Concerto. On Jan. 20 and 21, he returns to peruse the two books of preludes and fugues that constitute Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Only Carnegie could bring together the Olympian likes of Gidon Kremer and Krystian Zimerman, who will combine forces in Brahms’ sonatas for violin and piano (Nov. 1). Two nights later, the electrifying Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons arrives with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra for three programs of Strauss, Shostakovich, Wagner, Bartók and Beethoven.

If Carnegie has a house pianist, it’s the elegantly cerebral Pierre-Laurent Aimard. On Dec. 10, the French virtuoso appears with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the piano concerto of György Ligeti, in whose mischievous pyrotechnics Mr. Aimard is unexcelled. The following night, he will outdo himself in a program of 20 knuckle-busting études by everyone from Ligeti to Liszt.

A few blocks north at Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic is offering perhaps the greatest diversity of programs in its 165-year history. They range from a somber celebration of the 100th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birthday, conducted by music director Lorin Maazel, (Sept. 28 to Oct. 3), to a rambunctious collaboration with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra that includes Duke Ellington’s Harlem transfer of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music (Dec. 6 to 9).

At Christmastime, the Messiah to beat is likely to be the Philharmonic’s version of Handel’s evergreen, with a stellar group of soloists that includes the great American mezzo Stephanie Blythe. The British conductor is that nimblest of Handelians, Harry Bicket. He’s part of an invasion of formidable guest conductors, including Esa-Pekka Salonen, who in the new year will lead the world premiere of his new piano concerto with Yefim Bronfman (Feb. 7, 2007).

On Oct. 7, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series opens with a bang: Bernard Haitink leading the London Symphony Orchestra in all nine Beethoven symphonies (it goes out without a whimper seven months later, when Avery Fisher Hall becomes the setting for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s multimedia staging of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, trendily retitled The Tristan Project by director Peter Sellars). The series is chockablock with living luminaries, but they may all be upstaged by a pianist who lives only on recordings and film—the late Glenn Gould, whose idiosyncratic brilliance can be sampled in a 10-film series at the Walter Reade Theater (Oct. 20 to Nov. 18).

On Nov. 2, 3 and 4 at the auditorium in John Jay College, Great Performers is celebrating Steve Reich’s 70th birthday with the composer’s politically tendentious extravaganza, The Cave. (In the new year, the enterprising Miller Theater will pay tribute to Mr. Reich with an all-percussion program that shows the minimalist master in a more congenial light.)

The dynamic new artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, David Finckel and Wu Han, are offering meaty musical conversations at the refurbished Alice Tully Hall, roaming around a single composer like Brahms (Oct. 20 to Nov. 7).

The Frick Collection has a long history of introducing musical titans-in-the-making to New York audiences, and insiders are already touting a young Russian Romantic pianist, Yevgeny Sudbin—who performs at the museum on Dec. 3—as the next Rubinstein.

When it comes to picking great pianists, however, no presenter has a better record than the Metropolitan Museum’s series of Concerts and Lectures. This season, the Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium plays host to a dazzling assortment of keyboard artists, ranging from the Austrian protégé of Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner, to the venerable Czech poet, Ivan Moravec. The Met evening that every piano freak is salivating over is Oct. 26, when Ivo Pogorelich is scheduled to make his first New York appearance in a decade. Justly celebrated for musical unpredictability, the Yugoslav phenomenon is also renowned for his tendency not to show up at the appointed hour. We’ll see.

It was daring—perhaps foolhardy—of Morris to use not only three extended works by Mozart, but three extended piano works: the 11th and 27th concertos, with the Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos sandwiched in between. As a result, the three ballets, despite the intermissions separating them, tend to blend into one very long piece. But a) beggars can’t be choosers, and b) sometimes more is more. There’s a happy swell of dance invention from start to finish that keeps Mozart Dances afloat—and its dancers in dance heaven.

The three pieces are linked not only by their composer and—this season—by their pianist (the eminent Emanuel Ax, joined by Yoko Nozaki for the Double Sonata), but by their fresh and evocative backdrops by (Sir) Howard Hodgkin: huge, cheerful, feathery whorls of color against a white background. There are also dance motifs that link the three works—again and again, for instance, the dancers clasp their hands behind their necks; and there’s a strutting walk, heels down hard on the stage, that keeps recurring. (It’s cute—perhaps a little too cute.)

There’s also a deliberate structural connection. “Eleven” is essentially for women, with the men making a brief appearance at the start; “Double” is for the guys, with the women invading the stage for a minute or so midway through; “Twenty-seven” is for all 16 dancers, and it’s very boy-girl in its makeup—very couply.

“Eleven” is essentially a back-and-forth between Lauren Grant and the seven other girls. She’s Morris’ brilliant little hand grenade—short, compact, dynamic, with an explosion of yellow curls. In the first movement, she’s the piano, the girls are the orchestra: It’s all very strictly on the music that way until we get to the big splashy cadenza, when Grant falls to the ground and the seven others flail out of their careful backup patterns into a wild, jokey free-for-all—and then retreat into support mode. Grant used to be an oddball; she’s matured into a terrific main attraction, giving everything she’s got with her quick, darting reverses and turns. There’s lots of bird business in Mozart Dances, and in “Eleven” Grant is like a wren or a sparrow, perky, self-assured and indefatigable.

In “Double,” the central figure is Joe Bowie, dressed in a kind of open frock coat—very 18th-century—over black shorts and bare chest. He’s the chief strutter, and his chest pouts out—if he’s a bird, he’s a pigeon. The seven other men echo him—that strut is at moments almost like a group goosestep (more birds). But one of the seven emerges from the group during the long, dimly lit second movement. He’s a kid named Noah Vinson, who joined the company only two years ago and who has to be older than he looks. Talk about odd birds! He’s small, narrow, thin: a boy. But he has a convincing lyricism and an especially supple back, and Morris uses his different look by putting him in the middle of a six-man ring-around-the-rosy circle, where he suffers (from what?), survives, is mentored by the Bowie figure, and is absorbed back into the group. This weaving circle is ingeniously plotted and emotionally resonant, but it goes on too long—until it’s jump-started again by the shock of that momentary dramatic intervention of the girls, rushing on in long, white tulle skirts. And then comes an allegro molto that has everybody flying. Look at Elisa Clark, new to the company last year but an experienced—and exciting—dancer: Morris is already showcasing her. Look at Amber Darragh, fresh from her triumph last year as Dido (Morris’ onetime role in his version of Dido and Aeneas), now dancing with a new expansiveness and power. Look at Bradon McDonald, at Maile Okamura, at Michelle Yard—look at all of them!

The final dance, “Twenty-seven,” is in some ways the simplest—the most buoyant and transparent. Everyone’s now in white, the girls in lovely summery white dresses, the guys in white shirts over white shorts. This concerto, his last, is one of Mozart’s great works, but Morris doesn’t treat it solemnly—he flies under the radar with some of his most light-hearted invention since L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, his masterpiece from 1988. The second movement features a quartet of his senior dancers: Bowie, Grant, the beautiful Julie Worden, the quirky John Heginbotham. (The four of them are extraordinarily dissimilar physically, but they’re alike in their intensity and fullness of attack.) And the final movement, with all the dancers caught up in the simple yet profound charm of its music, coming back and back onto the stage in ever-changing solos and combinations, brings the three-part evening to a high-voltage finale.

Yet, notwithstanding its nonstop felicities and the sheer pleasure it affords, I’m left feeling that Mozart Dances is less than a masterpiece. Because the shape of the three pieces of music is the same—fast movement, slow movement, fast movement—and because their texture, despite Mozart’s exquisite variety, is relatively consistent, the evening doesn’t build (the way L’Allegro does); it accretes. The three sections echo each other rather than deepen each other, which may be why there’s something of a here-we-go-again feeling by the time we get to “Twenty-seven”—I wonder whether it mightn’t one day be even more effective as a single Mozart piece on a mixed bill.

In a recent Time Out interview, Mark Morris quotes Balanchine as saying that Mozart can’t be choreographed, and that “it’s just not true.” Come on, Mark, are you telling us you don’t know—and love—Mr. B.’s Divertimento No. 15? That sublime work goes deeper into Mozart than all three of these new pieces—and it does it all in one. But that doesn’t take away from the remarkable achievement of Mozart Dances. Apart from everything else, this less than perfect but lovely and seductive work reminds us that in these difficult days, we need Mozart more than ever.

It was daring—perhaps foolhardy—of Morris to use not only three extended works by Mozart, but three extended piano works: the 11th and 27th concertos, with the Sonata in D Major for Two Pianos sandwiched in between. As a result, the three ballets, despite the intermissions separating them, tend to blend into one very long piece. But a) beggars can’t be choosers, and b) sometimes more is more. There’s a happy swell of dance invention from start to finish that keeps Mozart Dances afloat—and its dancers in dance heaven.

The three pieces are linked not only by their composer and—this season—by their pianist (the eminent Emanuel Ax, joined by Yoko Nozaki for the Double Sonata), but by their fresh and evocative backdrops by (Sir) Howard Hodgkin: huge, cheerful, feathery whorls of color against a white background. There are also dance motifs that link the three works—again and again, for instance, the dancers clasp their hands behind their necks; and there’s a strutting walk, heels down hard on the stage, that keeps recurring. (It’s cute—perhaps a little too cute.)

There’s also a deliberate structural connection. “Eleven” is essentially for women, with the men making a brief appearance at the start; “Double” is for the guys, with the women invading the stage for a minute or so midway through; “Twenty-seven” is for all 16 dancers, and it’s very boy-girl in its makeup—very couply.

“Eleven” is essentially a back-and-forth between Lauren Grant and the seven other girls. She’s Morris’ brilliant little hand grenade—short, compact, dynamic, with an explosion of yellow curls. In the first movement, she’s the piano, the girls are the orchestra: It’s all very strictly on the music that way until we get to the big splashy cadenza, when Grant falls to the ground and the seven others flail out of their careful backup patterns into a wild, jokey free-for-all—and then retreat into support mode. Grant used to be an oddball; she’s matured into a terrific main attraction, giving everything she’s got with her quick, darting reverses and turns. There’s lots of bird business in Mozart Dances, and in “Eleven” Grant is like a wren or a sparrow, perky, self-assured and indefatigable.

In “Double,” the central figure is Joe Bowie, dressed in a kind of open frock coat—very 18th-century—over black shorts and bare chest. He’s the chief strutter, and his chest pouts out—if he’s a bird, he’s a pigeon. The seven other men echo him—that strut is at moments almost like a group goosestep (more birds). But one of the seven emerges from the group during the long, dimly lit second movement. He’s a kid named Noah Vinson, who joined the company only two years ago and who has to be older than he looks. Talk about odd birds! He’s small, narrow, thin: a boy. But he has a convincing lyricism and an especially supple back, and Morris uses his different look by putting him in the middle of a six-man ring-around-the-rosy circle, where he suffers (from what?), survives, is mentored by the Bowie figure, and is absorbed back into the group. This weaving circle is ingeniously plotted and emotionally resonant, but it goes on too long—until it’s jump-started again by the shock of that momentary dramatic intervention of the girls, rushing on in long, white tulle skirts. And then comes an allegro molto that has everybody flying. Look at Elisa Clark, new to the company last year but an experienced—and exciting—dancer: Morris is already showcasing her. Look at Amber Darragh, fresh from her triumph last year as Dido (Morris’ onetime role in his version of Dido and Aeneas), now dancing with a new expansiveness and power. Look at Bradon McDonald, at Maile Okamura, at Michelle Yard—look at all of them!

The final dance, “Twenty-seven,” is in some ways the simplest—the most buoyant and transparent. Everyone’s now in white, the girls in lovely summery white dresses, the guys in white shirts over white shorts. This concerto, his last, is one of Mozart’s great works, but Morris doesn’t treat it solemnly—he flies under the radar with some of his most light-hearted invention since L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, his masterpiece from 1988. The second movement features a quartet of his senior dancers: Bowie, Grant, the beautiful Julie Worden, the quirky John Heginbotham. (The four of them are extraordinarily dissimilar physically, but they’re alike in their intensity and fullness of attack.) And the final movement, with all the dancers caught up in the simple yet profound charm of its music, coming back and back onto the stage in ever-changing solos and combinations, brings the three-part evening to a high-voltage finale.

Yet, notwithstanding its nonstop felicities and the sheer pleasure it affords, I’m left feeling that Mozart Dances is less than a masterpiece. Because the shape of the three pieces of music is the same—fast movement, slow movement, fast movement—and because their texture, despite Mozart’s exquisite variety, is relatively consistent, the evening doesn’t build (the way L’Allegro does); it accretes. The three sections echo each other rather than deepen each other, which may be why there’s something of a here-we-go-again feeling by the time we get to “Twenty-seven”—I wonder whether it mightn’t one day be even more effective as a single Mozart piece on a mixed bill.

In a recent Time Out interview, Mark Morris quotes Balanchine as saying that Mozart can’t be choreographed, and that “it’s just not true.” Come on, Mark, are you telling us you don’t know—and love—Mr. B.’s Divertimento No. 15? That sublime work goes deeper into Mozart than all three of these new pieces—and it does it all in one. But that doesn’t take away from the remarkable achievement of Mozart Dances. Apart from everything else, this less than perfect but lovely and seductive work reminds us that in these difficult days, we need Mozart more than ever.

At Bard, the summer’s principal curio has been Schumann’s only completed opera, Genoveva, a work that’s had an occasional European revival but no lasting success since its less than triumphant premiere in 1850. For reasons that would require years of psychoanalysis to unravel, Schumann’s mercurial music, by turns magisterial and intimate, stirs me more than perhaps that of any other composer. I was deeply moved by Genoveva, as performed at Bard’s space-age, Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and I would jump at the chance to see it again.

Like Wagner, Schumann was a man with a mission, determined to put German Romantic opera on the noble footing occupied by the concert music of Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Unlike the more dramatically inclined Wagner, however, he viewed opera as a fusion of poetry and music. The plot of Genoveva details the horrific persecution of a stalwart wife wrongly accused of adultery with the conniving friend of her absent husband, who’s off fighting for the Christians in eighth-century Europe. But Schumann’s impassioned handling of it in compressed, swift-flowing scenes, set to tumultuous music that can turn on a dime from rhapsodic to eerie, elevates the piece way beyond pulp fiction.

John Daverio, in his definitive biography of the composer, Robert Schumann: Herald of “A New Poetic Age” (1997), calls Genoveva a “literary opera,” one that “begins as a Trauerspiel, a play of mourning, and ends as a hagiographic drama of redemption.” In this, the work calls to mind another composer’s singular operatic achievement—Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, which is similarly gripping as a large-scale musical poem about cruelty redeemed.

Mr. Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with knowing efficiency. Kasper Bech Holten, the artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, devised a visually stunning production that matched the score for opulent austerity. In the title role, the alluring Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg led a strong international cast that included the Danish baritone Johannes Mannov as Siegfried, and the American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the sorceress Margaretha. The affectingly light-voiced French tenor Philippe Castagner was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role—that of Golo, the treacherous best friend. Theirs was a Genoveva that should not be allowed to disappear.

MOSTLY MOZART'S MAJOR DISCOVERY has been the rare staging of an untitled operatic fragment known by the name of its heroine, Zaide. In 1779, Mozart was just 23 when he began an opera that he hoped would win him employment in Vienna. The plot he chose, a fashionable story of Oriental captivity, introduced a theme—the abuse of power—that he would later address with such astonishing complexity in his mature masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.

Scholars have speculated that Mozart left Zaide unfinished (it lacks an overture, a libretto and a finale) because it was, in essence, a self-portrait of the composer as a very young man. The hero is named Gomatz, a partial anagram of “Mozart”; the subject of enslavement hints at Mozart’s impatience to escape musical servitude in his hometown of Salzburg; and the absence of a third act revealing the fate of the captive lovers suggests that Mozart realized that his future as an opera composer was still up for grabs.

I can imagine a witty staging of Zaide that takes place inside the composer’s head and makes a virtue of the work’s patchy charms, leaving its occasionally breathtaking arias and ensembles to speak for themselves—and for the Mozart to come. But this show has been directed by Peter Sellars, an old hand at plucking daisies with a bulldozer.

During the 30 years since he put Handel’s Orlando in a trailer camp and Mozart’s Figaro in the Trump Tower, Mr. Sellars has gone from being an engaging imp to a moralizing scold. This most frail of Mozart’s vessels must now bear the weight not just of Turkish slavery during the Enlightenment, but of slavery in whatever form it exists in today’s world.

To this end, George Tsypin’s shallow, multi-tiered set, which filled the stage at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center, presented us with a punishing, neon-lit sweatshop in which a chorus of slaves slept under their sewing machines. Take that, globalization! Mr. Sellars used bombastic music from another early Mozart fragment, his theater music for Thamos, King of Egypt, to create an overture and connective tissue, during which the performers were asked to pantomime brutality, terror, lustfulness, pity and other manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man in poses that belonged on posters, not an opera stage. A dedicated group of non-white (read: politically cast) principals had clearly worked diligently (slavishly?) to master the semaphoric gestures of Mr. Sellars’ didactic naturalism.

For all that, I greatly enjoyed the verve with which Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis Langrée, led the estimable period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln through the young genius’ felicitous patchwork of music. And I admired the uniformly excellent singers, especially the true-voiced Zaide of the young Korean-American soprano Hyunah Yu and the rich bass-baritone of Alfred Walker as Allazim, a slave converted to Islam.

But Mr. Sellars no longer seems to know when to leave well enough alone. Whereas he once relied on the music and theatrical images to carry the evening, he now likes to pepper the proceedings with words—most of them his words—lest we miss the point. In a recent interview, he likened Mozart in his political prescience not only to such contemporaries as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but also to Martin Luther King Jr. In a program note, he writes that with Zaide, Mozart “chose to challenge the world with blazing sincerity in music of deep political conviction.” Hmmm, so that’s why he didn’t finish it. In the lobby, I encountered a table of pamphlets, one of which bore the message “Slavery Still Exists: And It Could Be in Your Backyard.”

No doubt—and no doubt Mr. Sellars’ heart is heavy with the world’s evils. But so, unfortunately, is his hand.

At Bard, the summer’s principal curio has been Schumann’s only completed opera, Genoveva, a work that’s had an occasional European revival but no lasting success since its less than triumphant premiere in 1850. For reasons that would require years of psychoanalysis to unravel, Schumann’s mercurial music, by turns magisterial and intimate, stirs me more than perhaps that of any other composer. I was deeply moved by Genoveva, as performed at Bard’s space-age, Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and I would jump at the chance to see it again.

Like Wagner, Schumann was a man with a mission, determined to put German Romantic opera on the noble footing occupied by the concert music of Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Unlike the more dramatically inclined Wagner, however, he viewed opera as a fusion of poetry and music. The plot of Genoveva details the horrific persecution of a stalwart wife wrongly accused of adultery with the conniving friend of her absent husband, who’s off fighting for the Christians in eighth-century Europe. But Schumann’s impassioned handling of it in compressed, swift-flowing scenes, set to tumultuous music that can turn on a dime from rhapsodic to eerie, elevates the piece way beyond pulp fiction.

John Daverio, in his definitive biography of the composer, Robert Schumann: Herald of “A New Poetic Age” (1997), calls Genoveva a “literary opera,” one that “begins as a Trauerspiel, a play of mourning, and ends as a hagiographic drama of redemption.” In this, the work calls to mind another composer’s singular operatic achievement—Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande, which is similarly gripping as a large-scale musical poem about cruelty redeemed.

Mr. Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with knowing efficiency. Kasper Bech Holten, the artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, devised a visually stunning production that matched the score for opulent austerity. In the title role, the alluring Swedish soprano Yiva Kihlberg led a strong international cast that included the Danish baritone Johannes Mannov as Siegfried, and the American mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens as the sorceress Margaretha. The affectingly light-voiced French tenor Philippe Castagner was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role—that of Golo, the treacherous best friend. Theirs was a Genoveva that should not be allowed to disappear.

MOSTLY MOZART'S MAJOR DISCOVERY has been the rare staging of an untitled operatic fragment known by the name of its heroine, Zaide. In 1779, Mozart was just 23 when he began an opera that he hoped would win him employment in Vienna. The plot he chose, a fashionable story of Oriental captivity, introduced a theme—the abuse of power—that he would later address with such astonishing complexity in his mature masterpieces The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute.

Scholars have speculated that Mozart left Zaide unfinished (it lacks an overture, a libretto and a finale) because it was, in essence, a self-portrait of the composer as a very young man. The hero is named Gomatz, a partial anagram of “Mozart”; the subject of enslavement hints at Mozart’s impatience to escape musical servitude in his hometown of Salzburg; and the absence of a third act revealing the fate of the captive lovers suggests that Mozart realized that his future as an opera composer was still up for grabs.

I can imagine a witty staging of Zaide that takes place inside the composer’s head and makes a virtue of the work’s patchy charms, leaving its occasionally breathtaking arias and ensembles to speak for themselves—and for the Mozart to come. But this show has been directed by Peter Sellars, an old hand at plucking daisies with a bulldozer.

During the 30 years since he put Handel’s Orlando in a trailer camp and Mozart’s Figaro in the Trump Tower, Mr. Sellars has gone from being an engaging imp to a moralizing scold. This most frail of Mozart’s vessels must now bear the weight not just of Turkish slavery during the Enlightenment, but of slavery in whatever form it exists in today’s world.

To this end, George Tsypin’s shallow, multi-tiered set, which filled the stage at the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center, presented us with a punishing, neon-lit sweatshop in which a chorus of slaves slept under their sewing machines. Take that, globalization! Mr. Sellars used bombastic music from another early Mozart fragment, his theater music for Thamos, King of Egypt, to create an overture and connective tissue, during which the performers were asked to pantomime brutality, terror, lustfulness, pity and other manifestations of man’s inhumanity to man in poses that belonged on posters, not an opera stage. A dedicated group of non-white (read: politically cast) principals had clearly worked diligently (slavishly?) to master the semaphoric gestures of Mr. Sellars’ didactic naturalism.

For all that, I greatly enjoyed the verve with which Mostly Mozart’s music director, Louis Langrée, led the estimable period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln through the young genius’ felicitous patchwork of music. And I admired the uniformly excellent singers, especially the true-voiced Zaide of the young Korean-American soprano Hyunah Yu and the rich bass-baritone of Alfred Walker as Allazim, a slave converted to Islam.

But Mr. Sellars no longer seems to know when to leave well enough alone. Whereas he once relied on the music and theatrical images to carry the evening, he now likes to pepper the proceedings with words—most of them his words—lest we miss the point. In a recent interview, he likened Mozart in his political prescience not only to such contemporaries as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin but also to Martin Luther King Jr. In a program note, he writes that with Zaide, Mozart “chose to challenge the world with blazing sincerity in music of deep political conviction.” Hmmm, so that’s why he didn’t finish it. In the lobby, I encountered a table of pamphlets, one of which bore the message “Slavery Still Exists: And It Could Be in Your Backyard.”

No doubt—and no doubt Mr. Sellars’ heart is heavy with the world’s evils. But so, unfortunately, is his hand.

6:01 p.m.

6 pounds, 9 ounces

Holy Name Hospital

Color them overjoyed: Painters Genevieve and Joseph McCarthy (he is also a graphic designer at Koch Entertainment), both 33, have a new little blank canvas, prompting them to move from artsy Williamsburg to ( yikes) Bergenfield, N.J. Ms. McCarthy already misses “the deli on the corner” in Brooklyn, but she is enjoying the extra space, not to mention her husband of two years’ active participation in the parenting process. “He does about half the feeding, half the rocking to sleep,” she said. “We don’t have any rules. We share every responsibility.” Ah, moderns! Porcelain-skinned little Olivia’s middle name was inspired by a storm during her birth, but she’s a mostly serene baby who enjoys cooing to her mother’s favorite music to work by: Mozart and Beethoven. Of course, Ms. McCarthy is eager to paint her firstborn’s portrait. “I just have to figure out which photo to use,” she said. “I have way too many.”