“At the end of the dress rehersal of C et M at CG, the audience applauded Netrebko and Garanca for 15 minutes, rather unusual for the reserved and cool British! Nebs is not that bad after all!”

Music criticism via applause meter.

Did she actually manage to get through an entire production without ever going off pitch? I would applaud that vociferously as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkcrkATqvWA&FMT=18

That is, not allow a lurch into what people could expect to see at a local high school production with all the usual risible faults and flaws plainly on show.
Where people politely tell each other untruthfully of course, that everybody had a fun night with a forced smile There, one is expected to forgive if some ‘little Ms Nattie’ screams a few notes and her tits off key, the direction is ratty because Ms Zimmer the drama teacher did a lousy job, like last time she handled things as well. Well next time everybody will have the new excuse “Its Regie, didn’t you know!” And some pretentious thing probably nicknamed the Queen of Maria Theresa Chandelieria so wanting to SUCH a fan of Regie because they believe it to be hip will exclaim “Yes, I know and is’nt it SOOOO outrageous opps, too I nearly always wet myself!”

“Yawn! Reactionary American audiences. Zzzzzzzzz”

Well, go sleep the sleep of the ill-informed. The staging was not “daring”– it was inept and cheap and lacked internal logic. Met audiences will cheer updated productions **if they work**: for example the brilliant LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK and more recently SALOME.

Anyone who sees this controversy as being about artistic daring in the face of conservatitism is a patsy of Gelb’s publicity machine.

I’ll be sulking in the powder room.

Or pouting int he sulker room.

One or the other, but I’ll be doing it.

WAGNER ! ! ! ARE YOU SIRIUS !! I MEAN SERIOUS ! ! ! !

Did you live through the recent spate of Tristshit und Ioldpoop?

Until the last run of Don Giovanni, I would have said the Met is still a good Mozart house. Rossini? Yes. Puccini is on-and-off.

What makes me scream in anguish is that I can’t see that The Met is in any worse shape than any other international house. Aida is an endangered specie. Another Regie Nabucco set in an opium den.

Hey, La Sonnambula set in a Catholic High School. That would work. Sort of “Grease” without the attitude. Yeah.

Sorry, I digress.

Give it some welly, you big sissies.

It’s one fucking bel canto disaster in this house after another. In this season alone a fifth rate Lucia with multi-tenor casting with epic fail after epic fail, and now this fifth rate, dredged up staging for a classic “weak libretto” (you bitches’ description, not mine.)

I mean really, why even fucking bother.

Can’t get through Verdi, can’t get through bel canto, is there ANYTHING this house can do well any more?

I seriously wonder.

Hence, may I explain that #77 is for the elucidation of #73

I would assume at that point, it was decided that to go one would be futile, so perhaps everyone left the stage at once, because all audience response stopped and I guess having had their say one way or the other they went home.

Ciri-biri and Biri-Bin went into their usual “Gee, I can hardly wait for tomorrow night. See you then” crap, and it was over.

I wonder if Renaaay is feeling any trepidation after seeing the show and the audience reaction.

At the end of the dress rehersal of C et M at CG, the audience applauded Netrebko and Garanca for 15 minutes, rather unusual for the reserved and cool British! Nebs is not that bad after all!

If Lucia was Zimmerman’s first attempt at directing an opera production. why did the Met engage her for three productions at the same time? Couldn’t they have “tested” her with Lucia and decide on Somnambula and Armida after Lucia?

If a singer who is making his/her house debut had been badly received by the audience and had been criticized in printed press, would the Met management re-engage that singer? Are they using the same “artistic criteria” to hire directors and directors?

Can the management give the Armida production to someone else?

I think the Met management bears the ultimate responsibility for this production. Even Joe Volpe describes in his memoir how he intervened, on more than occasion, in the creative process for a new production? The results may be discussable but clearly the Met General Manager has that power.

As for the complainers being too cheap, well, I forked out $350 US, and I agree with them, it was a crap production. I didn’t boo, but I sure as hell didn’t clap for Zimmerman’s team..

The production just didn’t make sense. Amina was one character during her entrance aria, the diva Dessay, and another from Prendi: l’anel ti dono onwards. Elvino wasn’t a character at all, a situation not helped by Florez. The entire situation surrounding Count Rodolfo was confused from go to woe, and the antics that ended Act I were completely unnecessary nonsense.

From the choral scene beginning Act II to the much lamented scrawling on the blackboard at the beginning of Ah! se una volta sola, to the Dessay-ex-machina device that carried the soprano over the orchestra for Ah, non credea, there were just too many theatrical gags and not much sensitivity to the music or the story. Whether or not that’s what Zimmerman intended, that’s how it appeared to this audience member.

I wasn’t particularly stunned by any of the musical contributions either. Pido was good, not unsupportive, but somewhat uninspired. Florez was his usual semi-brilliant self, and consistent, if only ever consistently 6.5 out of 10. Dessay’s Ah, non credea had some touching moments, which was just as much the composer as the soprano. And she was clearly vocally tired through Ah! non giunge.

If we are to believe Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “The artist is the creator of beautiful things”, then the only artist on the Met roster present last night was Renée Fleming, standing outside the Parterre boxes at fulltime, and looking ravishing.

Silence, i.e., lack of applause is the adequate response to a poor or uninspiring performance.

But when the performance offends, when it insults the art, then I say booing is the appropriate response.