Music: Curtains Up!

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The open season on culture in Manhattan used to begin with the first stroke of a Metropolitan Opera baton. But last week, with the Met season still a fortnight away, the town was jumping with cultural high jinks to satisfy almost any taste. Among the early season successes:

Symphony. The New York Philharmonic returned in triumph from its ten-week, ANTA-sponsored tour of Europe and the Near East, was greeted at Carnegie Hall with a red carpet, laurel-draped boxes, and placards reading "Welcome Home, International Heroes!" All told, the orchestra had played a brain-fogging total of 50 concerts in 29 cities of 17 countries. Unfortunately, the pace showed. The program was one that Bernstein and crew had played repeatedly in Europe: Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture and Triple Concerto (with Lenny conducting from the piano), Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Conductor Bernstein gave it all his familiar body English, and the orchestra plugged hard, but the sound was sometimes edgy. And even excellent playing could not save Shostakovich's Fifth from its own garish pretensions. Nevertheless, Lenny and the orchestra won a standing ovation.

Opera. The New York City Opera, which sandwiches its six-week fall season into the post-Labor Day lull before the Met's opening, was offering one of the most imaginative seasons of its inventive career. For his opening, Director Julius Rudel presented an improbable but highly successful pairing of Igor Stravinsky's austerely stylized Oedipus Rex and Carl Orff's lightly lyrical Carmina Burana, both conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The audience took to the double feature so enthusiastically that an additional performance was scheduled for last week. The season's second big hit: a superb production of Mozart's crystalline comic masterwork, Cosi Fan Tutte. Vienna-born Director Rudel, 38, is also offering the standards—Madame Butterfly, Boheme,

Carmen, Traviata—plus Kurt Weill's Street Scene and a new production of The Mikado. The very variety of the season, he thinks, is a tribute to an audience that cheerfully accepts City Center's small-scaled, tightly budgeted productions. "I don't have to do all the work for this audience," says he. "They don't want just to sit back and feel gorged."