OPERA
THURSDAY & FRIDAY, JULY 19 & 20*
7:30 PM

Haydn:  The Creation
La Fura dels Baus
Mostly Mozart Festival
Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall
10 Columbus Circle, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$35-$125
http://www.lincolncenter.org/mostly-mozart-festival/show/the-creation

Haydn's oratorio The Creation is (I'm not joking) one of the very peaks of Western culture:  it's probably the least-known great Classical work relative to its quality in the whole corpus.  But that isn't the only reason to go to this show.  This will be a staged version of this account of the creation/Adam and Eve myth, conceived and performed by La Fura dels Baus, a Catalan company whose work is fantastic in all senses of the word, flamboyantly incorporating techniques from video to slapstick.  And the chorus -- very important in this work -- is accentus, a world-beating French outfit that performs here much too rarely (accompanied in these performances by their associated period-instrument orchestra, Insula).  This should not be missed.  (BTW, I categorized this as "Opera" because what else do you call a staged oratorio?)

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  I throw up my hands and send you back to Guantanamera.  Might as well celebrate the creation of the world with a Cuban party.