In fact, the usual allowances made for archival performances aren't necessary here: Audio and visual elements are state-of-the-art, and casts are as meticulously handpicked as in well-considered studio recordings. Although the Met is criticized for conservative productions, what seems bland in the theater is often elegant and inviting on screen.
Levine's era began with the Met on the verge of financial collapse - as was the case with many New York City institutions in the 1970s. The Zeffirellian lavishness of the 1990s was a light-year off when an edgier, more austere Met cultivated a new identity in the 1979 telecast of the Brecht/Weill opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
But the creation Levine made most his own, as time went on, is the orchestra: Although the ensemble's performance was iffy in the 1978 Bartered Bride, a 1980 Don Carlo telecast has much of its now-customary polish and effortless lyricism. By the 1998 Lohengrin, orchestra, chorus, and singers move as an amazing, single-minded force in a recording I'll return to often.
Repertoire choices reflect Levine's pet interests. Amid crowd-pleasers such as The Marriage of Figaro on DVD with Frederica von Stade and Kathleen Battle in a handsome if fussy Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production, the thorny operatic masterpieces of the Second Viennese School - Schoenberg's Moses und Aron plus Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu - are more than well represented.
