People who don't know much about opera often wonder about what exactly to see.
The Met has taken a small step to help them.
You answer four simple questions - the reason you go to the opera, and which languages, style of opera and type of story you prefer - and the Met website will suggest which of their 2013-14 productions will suit you best.
It's not perfect, and it presupposes a little existing knowledge, but I was quite impressed with the the suggestions it made for me.
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If you'd like to see Jonas Kaufmann, Rene Pape, Peter Mattei et al in a full length recording of a certain New York opera house's certain Wagner opera, read on. As ever, the source material may disappear quickly, so you may wish to preserve it:
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Things got heated at the Met's Don Carlo last night when the first act campfire burned a little too enthusiastically, sending smoke drifting across the orchestra pit. "This was my first time seeing this production" emailed reader John "and I didn't realise anything was wrong until a stagehand came on to put it out with a fire extinguisher and everyone started laughing."
Everyone except Ramon Vargas and Barbara Frittoli, that is, who carried on singing as if nothing was happening. Or almost. Ramon Vargas, reports John, could barely keep a straight face. And who could blame him?
Hope he got a warm hand on his exit.
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The Metropolitan Opera is to cut ticket prices by an average of 10%, reports the New York Times. The average cost of admission will drop to $156 from $174.
Peter Gelb said he expected that attendance would rise to compensate for the lost revenue.
The cut is prompted by falling audience figures. Gelb said that this year's price increase was not "as successful as it might have been", whatever that means, and that HD audiences had cannibalised audiences. The New York Times says that attendance this season is projected to average 81% compared with last season's 84%, and that ticket revenue is projected to fall by $4m.
More than 2,000 seats for each performance will cost less after the cut, but not everyone will be better off. This is a business move, not a social improvement measure. An orchestra aisle seat that is $360 this season will be $330 next, but the $20 seats in the rear of the family circle will rise by $5.
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The full Metropolitan Opera season details are now available on their website - no surprises, the predictions were correct.
The HD schedule is as follows:
More details, including cinema listings, are on the Met website.
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Because a day without Jonas is, frankly, barely worth living. Here he is, backstage at the Met's Rigoletto, subjecting to Renee Fleming's probing.
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American Vogue comes over all operatic this month.
The online edition takes a look at the photogenic Kristine Opolais, currently starring in La rondine at the Met.
Don't expect any hardcore musical analysis though.
Hair (“We try to make the curls fall well, for all the parties she’ll attend after the show”) and makeup (“As HD has come into play, the audience has wanted a more natural look”) are attended to with the rigour and expertise you would expect from America's foremost fashion mag.
The print edition features a piece on Alba Clemente's fabulous costume designs for New York City Opera's Powder Her Face.
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More good tidings on what has turned out to be a heavy news day. Tony Pappano has definitively crushed the hopes of New Yorkers and reassured audiences at home.
Pappano said rumours he was set to replace James Levine at the helm of the Metropolitan Opera were "complete bollocks" reports Charlotte Higgins in today's Guardian.
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According to Bloomberg, swelling losses are behind the Metropolitan Opera's decision to raise $100m via the sale of bonds at the end of this week.
Losses from operations grew 7 percent last season to $135 million, the third consecutive increase. At the same time, operating revenue fell to $170.2 million, an 8 percent drop.
The news gets worse. Box office for the first four months of 2012-13 is down on last season.
The bond issue will be used to repay $63.2 million in loans from Bank of America Corp and to cover operating needs. The Bloomberg article also highlights the the threat of unfunded pension obligations (= projected future pension payments not covered by the Met's pension fund itself).
The bonds are expected to be sold to institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies.
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Let's face it, a chocolate-covered Simon Keenlyside is unlikely to materialise any time soon.
So here's the next best thing: Simon Keenlyside-covered chocolate.
Available at the Met's shop (though sadly not online).
***UPDATE***
I posted this after the reader who sent the photo told me they'd bought this chocolate at the Met shop.
Metropolitan Opera Customer Relations, however claim the chocolate "does not exist and appears to be a hoax that has been posted over the internet." "Unfortunately," they added "we have been unable to trace the origin of this falsehood."
Not quite. The chocolate does exist - but apparently only as gifts for production members. So, sadly, unless you can find your way to Iestyn Davies's fridge, a nibble is out of the question.
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A mere eight years after its Covent Garden premiere, Thomas Ades's The Tempest opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday. The composer, who conducts, previously worked with director Robert Lepage on a disappointing 2008 The Rake's Progress at the Royal Opera House.
For this show Lepage has a much bigger budget, and he comes up with something for everybody - acrobats, circus performers, an uncanny replica of La Scala and Simon Keenlyside with tattoos. Despite these lavish accoutrements, not everyone who saw the test run in Québec a couple of months ago was impressed.
The 10 November performance will be shown live in cinemas.
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...........here's the next best thing. Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani perform Poiché non sono amato at the dress rehearsal for L'elisir d'amore, which opens the Met season tonight. Now what's all that about dropping the -inas?
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The Met joins the Bavarian State Opera in backing Evgeny Nikitin over his 'Nazi tattoo' controversy, Peter Gelb has told the New York Times.
In a phone interview with the paper, arranged by the Met, Nikitin clarified the incomplete and sometimes contradictory statements which have been made by him or on his behalf since the scandal broke. He said he had given Bayreuth Festival management "carte blanche to say what they wanted to preserve the festival".
Nikitin explained that the swastika-like symbol seen on his chest in old photos was just an incomplete eight-pointed star of his own design which had to be stopped part way through when he began to bleed, and supplied the paper with the sketch above.
He said he had never had any connection to a neo-Nazi or fascist movement.
"“It would be really a shame if an artist’s career was destroyed over something that isn’t true,” Mr. Gelb said."
Nikitin remains booked to appear in next year's Met Parsifal.
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“When you look at this you feel like this is finally the ‘Ring’ that Wagner would have wanted all along” says Georges Nicholson, a 'Wagner historian' not found in Intermezzo's Big Book of Wagner Historians. His extravagant claim for Robert Lepage's Met Ring was made in Susan Froemke’s documentary film Wagner’s Dream. “We are actually having the vision that Wagner had when he was composing,” he adds for good measure.
What, a row of spinning planks controlled by a microchip? I'm more inclined to think Wagner would prefer the Bavarian State Opera's latest wheeze - filling downtown Munich with naked Germans and taking photos.
Artist Spencer Tunick has been invited to create one of his famous mass-nude installations on the opening weekend of the summer opera festival (no doubt clearing the top end of the Englischer Garten in the process). Sadly, the work will not be called Tunick in Munich, but The Ring. Why?
As Intendant Nikolaus Bachler puts it: "Andreas Kriegenburg primarily tells his version of The Ring of the Nibelung by means of the performers' stage and gesticulation movements in addition to their singing. This produces an interesting equivalence to Spencer Tunick's human body installations. That is why it was an obvious choice to show these two projects for the Opera Festival".
But of course! Mr Lepage must wish he had someone like Herr Bachler to spin those planks.
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"WQXR pulled a blog posting critical of the Metropolitan Opera’s new “Ring” cycle last month after the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, personally complained to the radio station’s top executive." reports Dan Wakin in the New York Times.
WQXR is a New York classical radio station. According to the New York Times, "The Met has a small sponsorship arrangement with WQXR, which for decades has broadcast live Met performances on Saturdays."
So, not burdened with a newspaper's constitutional requirement to put truth before cash, WQXR went for the latter. Their business decision is both understandable and excusable.
What's less clear is why Peter Gelb couldn't take blogger Olivia Giovetti's reasoned, substantive and widely-shared criticism on the chin. Paradoxically, his action has ensured that the offending article will probably be far more widely read than it ever would have been otherwise.
More on this at parterre.com, where you can also read a preserved copy of the offending blog posting.
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The Saturday audience at the Met for L'Elisir d’Amore (and radio listeners) had an unexpected treat when Juan Diego Flórez encored his rapturously received Una furtiva lagrima (complete with bonus high notes).
The Met whipped out a detailed press release so quickly one might almost imagine the whole thing was planned in advance to ginger up the 20 year old production on its final outing (a new production is in the works for next season). From this we learn that JDF also gave the last Met encore, in 2008.
Fortunately some miscreant had a recording device to hand, so we can watch as well as listen to both iterations.
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No confirmation at this stage of which UK cinemas will be participating, but the Metropolitan Opera's 2012-13 live broadcast schedule looks like this:
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"I show the public what they ought to see, not what they want to see," Bavarian State Opera Intendant Nikolaus Bachler told a Munich symposium as he debated the future of opera with the Met's Peter Gelb.
The Americans, the audience were told, bow to public taste.
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Any idea what inspired this "playful yet sophisticated executive desk set"?
Yes, it's Robert Lepage's Met Machine, restyled in miniature. Boasting a mere 15 planks rather than the 24 of the original, it comes in around 20 million bucks cheaper at $15. It "can be fashioned into shapes reminiscent of the stage settings in the Ring cycle or pulled apart and refashioned into an unlimited number of configurations" if you need any further tempting.
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