On the Right Track With ‘Die Soldaten’

By GEORGE LOOMIS [NY Sun, 7 July 2008]
Any festival in a big city needs to offer something radically different from normal fare, or it doesn’t deserve to be called a festival. This hurdle is surmounted triumphantly by the Lincoln Center Festival with its production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten,” or “The Soldiers,” which opened on Saturday, not simply because it has chosen a complex, modernistic opera as its musical centerpiece but because it has staged it in the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.