Opera Companies' Fraught Seasons.

GEORGE Steeltoe Ensemble (Performer); NEW York City Opera; WEISGALL, Hugo; OPERA companies; DRAMATIC music

GEORGE STEEL has just completed his first season as the general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera. That the company had a season at all -- let alone one that offered an important revival of a challenging contemporary American opera, Hugo Weisgall's ''Esther,'' and an inventively updated, sexy production of Mozart's ''Don Giovanni'' -- is a real achievement. A year ago the possibility that the City Opera, crippled by a gnawing deficit and a leadership crisis, might fail seemed all too possible. Last weekend, while hosting VOX 2010, the company's annual contemporary American opera lab at New York University's Skirball Center, Mr. Steel seemed in his element. As he introduced concert performances of excerpts from 10 diverse new operas, he boasted of the City Opera's ''turnaround season'' and discussed plans for 2010-11. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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