Time has been running since my return from Santa Fe more than a month ago. We have rehearsed our two fall productions and opened the first of them, Gluck's marvelous Iphigénie en Tauride, last Thursday.

Even though I've been doing it for ten years now opening a new season always feels very special to me. Having our audience back in the house and see them cheer our artists like they did on Thursday really gives all the sense to what we're doing. I was happy to have Robert Carsen back with another Gluck opera after Orfeo last spring and see his work being acknowledged so warmly in his hometown and, also, to welcome my old friend Susan Graham to our stage. Sitting there at opening night I couldn't stop myself from being proud of how wonderfully a great singer's voice showcases our magnificent hall.

On our free day between the opening of Iphigénie and today's piano dress rehearsal of Rigoletto I took my two conductors, Johannes Debus and Pablo Heras-Casado, to New York for a performance of Lully's Atys at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience this groundbreaking production that started the renaissance of French baroque opera in the late 1980s so masterfully performed by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.

In the meantime we've also fallen into city budget purgatory and it looks as if this will continue until November, at least. As a company that needs to program four to five years ahead in order to keep up with our international peers we deeply rely on a reliable funding horizon. We would be a very different company without the support we receive from three levels of government and I truly hope that we will find a way to work with the city that addresses budget constraints while maintaining a sustainable environment for the arts.