How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice! Alternatively, open your checkbook. That is what the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, celebrating 30 years of grantmaking, has done on behalf of the estimable Greek National Opera. Visiting New York for the first time, the company pays tribute to Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), the journalist, politician, poet, philosopher, and nine-time Nobel Prize nominee for the Indian-summer harvest of novels from his last decade. Among his major titles, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and The Last Temptation of Christ have inspired symphonies, operas, plays, ballets, and filmmakers beyond number. At Carnegie Hall, Vassilis Christopoulos conducts what his compatriots will recognize as a program of greatest hits. Yet for the local audience, most will be discoveries. Highlights include Cretan Feast by Dimitri Mitropoulos (remembered in New York as a legendary conductor), selections by Manos Hadjidakis for the dramatic adaptation of Captain Michalis, and the three-movement Amor Fati, wherein Giorgios Koumendakis evokes the sound world of Crete without recourse to traditional Cretan instruments. The indispensable terpsichorean element comes into its own with dances by Nikos Skalkottas and of course Mikis Theodorakis, whose addictive score for Zorba the Greek the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences snubbed in favor of nominations for Laurence Rosenthal (Becket), Dimitri Tiomkin (The Fall of the Roman Empire), Frank DeVol (Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte), Henry Mancini (The Pink Panther), and the Sherman Brothers Richard M. and Robert B., who took home the statuette for Mary Poppins. Ah, well. “Love what is,” Kazantzakis might have counseled, heroic pessimist that he was, “and then fight it to the death.” The soprano Maria Kostraki and the redoubtable mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, back from her overpublicized post-partum vocal crisis, are the evening’s soloists. —Matthew Gurewitsch