Leave your First Folio at the door. As Grottesco’s 12th Night unfolds, Shakespeare’s original becomes increasingly irrelevant. The production is finally a self-contained story with no bearing on Twelfth Night. The audience, along with the servants, is left without a script, without resolution and without so much as a hint of what will happen next.

Gaddes will be remembered warmly as the man who respected the SFO’s traditions, extended its reach and expanded its artistic horizons.

The season winds down.

The next time you’re waiting for things to happen in St. Francis Auditorium, courtesy of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, glance up at those three microphone lines elegantly looped and dangled above the stage. The refined, fine-drawn grace of the Calderesque lines characterizes the work of young Israeli pianist Benjamin Hochman.

Noon-time chamber music concerts are a very good thing. They’re relatively informal, they’re untroubled by intermissions, and they set the audience free in plenty of time for a lovely lunch. The music can be pretty good too.

A chamber music program such as the one opening the current season in St. Francis Auditorium could never have happened in 1973. For one thing, this year’s opener alone required 14 artists—the total roster of 1973 for all six concerts. For another, the play-it-safe programming of then just isn’t on the agenda of now.

People will say, “Oh, so this is a feminist opera, then,” and having provided a neat label feel they’ve settled the matter. Or, again, “Oh, so this is an anti-war opera,” and provided yet another label that explains nothing. If Adriana Mater is about anything, and it is, it’s about birth.

Radamisto, Handel’s first opera seria for London and now on view at the Santa Fe Opera in an eye-filling, neo-baroque staging, was meant to astound audiences. It still does.

The Santa Fe Opera's gleaming new production of Billy Budd justifies Britten’s arduous, hugely rewarding effort on nearly every level. First, there’s Teddy Tahu Rhodes, whose performance in the title role quite simply ranks among the most memorable SFO debuts ever. I’m thinking von Stade, te Kanawa, Terfel, for starters...

It became mighty clear in my annual pre-festival chat-up with artistic director Marc Neikrug that surprise and contrast play a major role in the way he’s planned many of this season’s Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival concerts.