Have you seen High Wire: Calder's Circus at 100 at the Whitney? If so, you'll know how hard it is to tear yourself away. Surprise! I was running late when I raced out the revolving door two weeks ago to catch the matinee of Arabella at the Met. Meant to dash to the subway, but instead hopped a waiting cab with its nose pointed straight to the West Side Highway, and named my destination. "Lincoln Center!," the cabbie exclaimed. "My grandmother use to take me to the opera and the ballet there all the time!"

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Olaf Bär--Bär, pronounced bear, means bear--has come to the court of the art song like a folk tale's hero from afar. (Even the whiff of the Nordic forests in his name seems right.) Unknown, untried, scarcely regarded even by those who sent him from East Germany, he presented himself in London six years ago at the first Walther Gruner International Lieder Competition and smilingly prevailed. Part of the prize was a debut at Wigmore Hall, London's classiest recital venue. On Friday, November 18, 1983, Bär took the stage with a rich program of Mendelssohn, Wolf, and Richard Strauss grouped around the centerpiece of Schumann's popular cycle Dichterliebe ("A Poet's Love"). By evening's end, the lyric baritone had added to his conquests the city's most discriminating critics, as well as scores of cognoscenti for whom the German art song's rushes of romance, subtleties of mood, and stabs of irony border on an obsession.

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Meet the man who shook the hand of Mickey Mouse: Leopold Stokowski, a self-created legend in his own time.

If you knew Stoki like Nancy knew Stoki!

Still in her teens, Nancy Shear of Philadelphia began insinuating herself into the world of the Philadelphia Orchestra as single-mindedly as Eve Harrington, of "All About Eve" fame, insinuated herself into the milieu of the Broadway diva Margot Channing. But while Eve was a snake in the grass, out to supplant her idol, Nancy was an innocent under the spell of the music. She had no yen at all for the spotlight.

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What genius looks like. Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia, model interpreters of Balanchine's resonant "Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée,'" danced to the Stravinsky score.

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A climactic moment in the Theater an der Wien's production of Francesco Gasparini's 'Ambleto': from left, the dead Polonius (Nikolay Borchev), Hamlet (Raffaele Pé), Ophelia (Erika Baikoff), Laertes (Maayan Licht), and Gertrude (Ana Maria Labin) (Photos by Herwig Prammer)

VIENNA — The operatic cabinet of curiosities that is Vienna's Theater an der Wien came up with a potential beaut this season: the first Hamlet opera, originally performed in Venice in 1705, revived in Naples in 1711, and then in London (imagine!) in 1712, not to surface again until this month. This report follows the second performance, on May 8.

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