Washington’s shutdown drama is not the only one currently on offer: classical music in America is enduring its own hell week, the most significant crisis to affect the industry since the Great Recession took hold in 2008. The Minnesota Orchestra, locked out by management for a year, has now lost its music director, Osmo Vänskä; Aaron Jay Kernis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who directs the Orchestra’s lauded Composer Institute, has also resigned, providing a moment of clarity in his resignation letter, which sagely criticizes both management and the musicians in the dispute. Back in New York, Carnegie Hall has cancelled its opening-night concert, which was to feature Joshua Bell, Esperanza Spalding, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, because of a stagehands’ strike. The stagehands are picketing the hall with a giant inflatable rat. [UPDATE: Carnegie Hall’s second concert, a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra scheduled for Thursday night, will proceed as scheduled, while contract talks with the union continue.]

New York’s big story is, of course, the demise of New York City Opera: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia founded the company as “the people’s opera,” but the current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, declined the chance to save it. As the saying goes, the organization fell apart gradually, then all at once—Fred Cohn’s fine piece in Opera News, from January of 2012, laid out the company’s long history of artistic triumph and financial difficulty, and virtually predicted its end. The bad decisions of George Steel, City Opera’s last director, were piled on top of those made by Susan L. Baker, the former board chair, and by Gerard Mortier, Steel’s putative predecessor, who never actually took up the job. There are those who think that if Francesca Zambello, the widely respected director of Glimmerglass Opera and of the Washington National Opera, whose operatic expertise outstripped Steel’s, had been appointed in his stead, the company would still be in business. But now we’ll never know.

The silver lining to all this is that opera in New York is alive and well—especially the feisty, contemporary kind. Young American composers are practically falling over themselves to write operas, in all sorts of styles and on all sorts of subjects; there are workshop programs (like that of American Opera Projects) out there to nurture them, and daring new ventures, like the Prototype festival (spearheaded by Beth Morrison Projects), to mount them. Gotham Chamber Opera, no longer a fledgling effort but a solid player, produces inventive stagings of operas old and new; Amore Opera, the successor to the beloved shoestring company Amato Opera, puts on not only family-friendly Mozart but such daring ventures as the U.S. première, in 2011, of Mercadante’s “I Due Figaro,” a work from 1835 that had just been given its first modern performance by a scrappy outfit called the Salzburg Festival.

The catch is that all of these smaller outfits, while thoroughly professional, do not put out the kind of world-class performances that City Opera could, at its best, reliably present—not just in the glory days of Beverly Sills and Samuel Ramey, not just in the fresh and innovative Handel stagings of the nineties and aughts, but in the company’s final effort, the stunning, American-première production of “Anna Nicole,” a recent, vital work by a major composer, Mark-Anthony Turnage (originally presented by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden), which closed at BAM barely a week ago. Work on that level will likely be continued at Lincoln Center, certainly by the Mostly Mozart Festival, and probably by the New York Philharmonic, where Alan Gilbert has led stagings of operas by Ligeti and Janáček at Avery Fisher Hall.

And what about BAM? Will the Brooklyn cultural renaissance extend beyond craft beer and basketball to opera? After all, “Anna Nicole,” a BAM-City Opera co-production, sold its seven performances at at least ninety-five per cent of capacity, and attracted a diverse crowd. But that is a question only donors can really pose, and that the younger audiences of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, who have their pick of a plethora of entertainment offerings, both live and on screens, can really answer.

Photograph by Carnegie Hall