Der Rosenkavalier

Highly recommended: The season's last production of Der Rosenkavalier at the Met on Friday, Jan. 15 at 7:30 p.m. Renee Fleming is spectacular. The opera premiered in 1911 and is a masterpiece of ravishing late-romantic music. The plot, set in 18th-century Vienna, pokes fun at snobbery, celebrates youthful love and gives voice to the noble sadness of growing old. Note: The show has two intermissions and lasts four and a half hours.

Don't Worry, Government is in Charge, Part II

Several readers have objected to my Dec. 29 post on government's responsibility for swine flu shortages. They protested that certain pharmacies other than the one I mentioned do indeed offer the vaccine, and that in fact truckloads of vaccine are being carted away for dumping due to lack of demand.

All very true, I'm sure, so I must expand my point.

For my 15 years in New York, I have obtained my flu shot from my own doctor. I know him, I know his nurses, and I am confident in the cleanliness of his operation. This year, my doctor was not given an adedquate supply of the regular vaccine, and he never was able to obtain any swine flu vaccine, despite having dotted all the i's, crossed all the t's and applied to the proper authorities on time.

He told me that I could go to a makeshift clinic at a public school for a swine flu shot, but that I'd have to wait in line ..for a long time.

Now, I'm of the age that I don't like spending my limited time waiting in school auditoriums for basic medical precautions. Neither am I enthusiastic about popping into a designated drugstore across town where I don't know the staff. Anyway, I try to limit the time I spend in drugstores with my three-year-old, else I'd be liable for hundreds of dollars in bills for broken bottles.

So why didn't they give my doctor vaccine this year? He's not exactly a slouch as doctors go. In fact, he was the chief resident at New York/Cornell, which is equivalent in the world of residents to being the Godfather.

I have a theory. It's because "they're" trying to run private doctors out of business. They've reduced their payments and they've made their lives so miserable with crazy regulatory paperwork that many have stopped accepting insurance. Now, they're cutting off their supply of medicine.

The Mayo Clinic said this month it would no longer accept Medicare patients at its Arizona center because ObamaCare would cut reimbursement so much that it is no longer practical to offer care. This isn't some plastic surgery factory; it's the Mayo Clinic! Mayo said it would "study" the effect of the decision, a clear signal that health care will be in short supply if government persists on its course.

But that's always the case when government officials start believing they are smart enough to be distributors, be it of money (viz. the credit crunch) or medicine.

I hate ideologues, and I don't want to be one myself. I am always willing to hear arguments that would refine my thinking or change my mind. But the government's handling of the 2009-2010 flu vaccine still seems to be less than ideal.

Borscht, Beethoven and Brahms

For an extraordinary evening, invite a few concert musicians from the former Soviet Union to dinner.

The City Opera violinist took charge of the cooking. She brought all of the ingredients and made everything fresh on the spot. Borscht with beets, carrots, three colors of bell pepper, potatoes, parsnips. Kasha. Rice pudding with coconut milk, with cinnamon sugar carefully wrapped in a brown paper envelope. Dainty sour cherry dumpings with transparent skins, folded before my eyes, doused in a delicious cherry sauce, with full-flavored Latvian sour cream from Brighton Beach.

We lit candles and said a traditional Hebrew blessing over challah bread. Then we ate until 1:30 a.m. Great comfort food was interspersed with great stories of hardship, survival and heroism. "We fled to Siberia...I paid 900 rubles to get my violin out of the country. It took me three years once I got to Israel to pay it back.... They wanted to drill a hole in my violin before I could take it, but my father went into hysterics.... We had to leave our Bluthner piano in Russia; they would only let us take three violins, our underwear and the clothes on our backs... He played in Paris and they paid him almost nothing, just like everybody else..."

Stories of World War II are remembered. How a brave Japanese diplomat wrote 2,000 visas for Latvian Jews to go to Japan and kept issuing them aboard the train that took him away after his firing...how the Jews arriving in Japan were sent to Manchuria to work in factories...how they went to Israel after the war, and how one violinist's father was shot there, after coming so far, by an Arab sniper.

Stories of growing up: "We kept the carrots and pickled cabbage in big barrels between the double entry doors to keep cold, and grew garlic and opinions on the window sill. Then we had potatoes and onions. Those were the only vegetables all winter." "My grandfather used to say, 'If you stack the dumplings horizontally instead of vertically when you eat, you would be able to put your boots on." "My mother would kill me if she saw me putting the dumplings in a bowl, you're supposed to lay them out separately on a flat plate."

Each of my guests surmounted unbelievable obstacles to settle and make their livings in the United States. Not satisfied merely with having survived, they have a dream. They wish to start a music school similar to the excellent ones they attended in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where children were taught where music fit in history, along with superior technique and musicianship. But this school would have a difference: it would enjoy the open society's freedom.

"I didn't hear Handel's Messiah until I arrived in Canada," said the St. Petersburg-trained violinist. "It wasn't permitted in the Soviet Union. I'll never forget the first time I heard it."

The City Opera violinist had been more fortunate. "My school had a full library, because we were in the provinces far away from watchful eyes."

Having been deprived of so much, they love literature passionately. They all know Rabelais. The Latvian pianist goes into rhapsodies over my copies of the Divine Comedy and The Odyssey. They are at home in a world of New York's scholarly Russian expatriate intellectuals -- an obvious talent pool for the dream school's teachers.

These women are seeing their livelihoods and culture disappearing fast. They teach and play for ludicrously small remuneration, often under the dictats of directors without classical music background. Even back home in Russia, the government is on the verge of ending funding for the schools that turned them into world-class musicians, as oligarchs who care nothing for classical music control the country's massive oil wealth.

The City Opera violinist learned yesterday that the opera would be no fall season. Perhaps, she joked, she will open a restaurant. "We could play there," said the other violinist, a consummate chamber musician who has played all over the world. "If there is nowhere else."

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam's "Imaginarium" is one of the most important, beautiful works of art in the last half century.