Last week, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was facing a budget crunch. Wow, like, that’s a surprise? Some staff members have already taken pay cuts, salaries will be discussed with unions. And of course the crisis will impact programming: Costly revivals of Ghosts of Versailles, Benvenuto Cellini, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and [...]

This impressive and startling production of German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s iconic opera Die Soldaten, staged in the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, achieves the intimate and immersive “total theater” experience the composer took “decisive steps” to realize more than four decades ago. The audience, literally traveling along the length [...]

It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before [...]