A beginning

I didn't attend last night's event, though given the absentee director and Gergiev's characteristic variability the future iterations that I do see may be much different. (It is, incidentally, amusing that it took one of Putin's more offhand bits of villainy to foreground the Russian conductor's long-deplorable enthusiasm for the strongman.)

But Onegin yesterday was merely the showy resumption of the Met's general activity. Tonight's Cosi brings back the man whose virtues have been too long missed at the Met: James Levine. And it features, as my long-ago preview noted, the opera that reached, in its last Levine revival, perhaps the peak of the great conductor's entire Met tenure.

However tonight actually goes, it should be momentous.