On Bloomberg, Philip Boroff (he of the “Carnegie Hall Stagehand Moving Props Makes $530044″ shockeroo), spills the beans on NYCO’s finances. Most breathtaking factoid: attendance in the George Steel’s first season (2009-10) stood at less than 25% of attendance in Paul Kellogg‘s final year (2006-07).

At the New York Times, Dan Wakin has gathered the gloomiest group of quotes imaginable, stopping just short of  “O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see,” though I think Cori Ellison probably did say  that while the recorder was paused.

Wakin best catches the apocalyptic tone when he wails, “The anguished expressions of regret came amid a deafening silence from Lincoln Center and City Opera officials, and leaders of other cultural institutions who might serve as hosts for the company in its new peripatetic persona.”

And, Bloomberg again: “The union said it will protest the end of guarantees by picketing outside Steel’s home, among other measures.”

A Met spokesman said that Mr. Levine was not available to discuss the trip. But his manager, Ronald Wilford, said: “Whatever the Met decides, he will do. If the Met administration believes it can go to Japan and not risk things, then he will go, I think. I haven’t talked to him about it, and I’m not going to.”

And Wilford is the sensible one among the Levine team Gelb has to negotiate with!

Astute Alex Ross op-eds the Met’s season opener at the New York Times .  

“The Times is still the Times, and Opera News is still Opera News,” says Ecclesiastes Zachary Woolfe, interviewed by Dan (who also, wonder of wonders, chats with none other than JJ) in “Net Effects,” an all-too-brief analysis of how “the Internet is changing the way we read about opera.”  La Cieca is gratified to note that our humble little cum-blog is mentioned in passing, in what is perhaps the most insidery bit of writing to be seen in the pages of Opera News since their cover story about Brian Kellow‘s annual tea dance on the anniverary of Dolores Gray‘s death.

As is their custom when publishing articles about online journalism, Opera News has not made this piece available online (yes, they are indeed 75 years old), so I guess, cher public, you’ll have to wait for your dead-tree version to arrive in the mail.

In the words of the prophet Zack, yes, indeed, the Times is very much still the Times, and La Cieca will further note that Dan Wakin is still out there beating the mean streets until the Met’s press office is ready to spoonfeed him his latest story. We get the 14th in a 200 part series about the Robert Lepage Ring in the New York Times today, this time with a slideshow of Rheingold images “from the first dress rehearsal” (presumably one that Bryn Terfel was in town for).

Now, of course, you can’t judge a production from the photographs, and all that (if nothing else, the Regie quiz teaches us this universal truth) and yet… These are images produced with the very close assistance of the Met, for what amounts to a puff preliminary for the company’s flagship production of the season, so maybe just a little close reading (or in this case, close viewing) might be in order?

Purely as observed as the selection of still photos published by the Times, this show looks to La Cieca a little plain, rather small, and (this is the worst of it) altogether tame.  Depending on how the “machine” is lit, sometimes it looks like a rather nice deck on a Hamptons share house, and other times it looks like the facade of a Soviet-era office block.

With the lights all lit and the thing moving, probably it’s a whole different experience, but the Met and the Times gave us still photos, so that’s what we have to react to at the moment—and react you will, I trust, cher public, to the images as well as to such ominous paragraphs as

The greater worry is that something— a prop, a wig or a limb — might get in the way of the slowly moving platform. Emergency stop buttons have been installed, and a rigging and safety adviser who often works with Cirque du Soleil was hired. An army of stagehands will guide the singers and acrobats in their movements about the set.

To La Cieca, and you know she has a best a gutter sort of imagination, this all sounds just too Stephen King for words. (“Having at last tasted human blood, the set was at last still, releasing only the faint sound that might have been a sigh.”)

A source close to the Met whispers that the rehearsals thus far have been “excruciatingly slow, and plagued by multiple technical glitches, which end up dragging out the rehearsal process beyond scheduled stop times, resulting in numerous overtime expenses for technical crew.” The informant adds, “And to what effect? So far nothing looks very exciting.”

Of course, a lot can happen in two weeks, and La Cieca understands that the Met’s main stage will be devoted to that production practically every day of that time before the opening night. But will this show turn out to be just too complicated for the Met?

Because, you see, it’s hard to convincingly criticize the criticism (as Kellow does in the “current” Opera News, but don’t bother to check because it’s not online) without having heard the thing criticized.

BK goes on to rip Anthony Tommasini‘s coverage of Leonard Slatkin‘s ill-fated foray into Verdi, even going so far as to say that Tommasini’s review “[wound] up causing the withdrawal of a respected conductor.”

But as always it seems La Cieca’s on the wrong side of the argument, because she thought that the Slatkin review showed a welcome hint of snarky spine in Tommasini, who, for all his moistness over barihunks, is after all a well-trained and intelligent musician.

For once (or for rarely anyway) AT worked up a bit of righteous anger over what he saw as a massive artistic blunder. He didn’t explain it away by saying Slatkin had an off day, or maybe his old war wound was bothering him, or, you know, Traviata is such a rare and difficult gem that he deserves kudos for even making the attempt. No, Tommasini yelled “tripe” when tripe was served, to paraphrase one of those early sixties sitcoms La Cieca is talking about so much today.

Kellow does make one solid point, which is that Tommasini might have made “a point-for-point case for how [Slatkin] failed at various points in the evening,” that is,offering specific examples from the score of what went haywire and how. To attempt such an analysis in a daily paper would be folly, of course, even in the capacious pages of the Times. But blog space is cheap, and the NYT even has the advantage of multimedia capabilities.  They could have done a score animation, for example, demonstrating the same passage as led (differently but with equal validitiy) by a couple of recognized experts, as contrasted with the Slatkin stumbling.

Or, then again. As fond as La Cieca is of examples (ask any of her writers what her edits invariably ask for more of), there does come a point when, if only for reasons of convenience, the general reader wants to let the critic do the heavy lifting and then deliver a few carefully-chiseled adjectives to sum up: “is this worth my $200 or should I stay home and catch up on my Real Housewives?”