Says the Met press office: “Yonghoon Lee will sing the title role in Don Carlo during the Met’s Japan tour, replacing Jonas Kaufmann, who has withdrawn for personal reasons. [Yeah, we knew that, but, wait, there’s another paragraph]….  Ekaterina Gubanova will make her Met role debut as Eboli in the same production, replacing Olga Borodina, who has been ordered by her physicians to take a two-month vocal rest.”

On the bright side, compared to the atmosphere in the Met’s front office this afternoon, nobody could ever call Japan “toxic.”