But, as Remnick notes in the same article, Russian television now, 22 years later, has been closing its doors on glasnost and once again structuring itself out of perestroika. Crowds have once again to fill Red Square, and whatever stability president Vladimir Putin has fostered over the last decade-and-change has begun to show cracks in its façade.

“The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism,” Putin says as a catchall excuse for the increasing number of outspoken critics against his leadership, the blogs and websites and viral videos and Twitter accounts that speak out against him when the people in the streets are not. His reelection earlier this month has only caused more outrage and ire, culminating in a closed-off inauguration event—tinted windows, blocked off streets, closed metros.

A similar event took shape in New York this year. While it’s foolhardy to compare global politics with the inner workings of one opera house, even the biggest opera house in the country, a similar pallor was cast over the Metropolitan Opera this year when the company announced its 2012-13 season: No press conference, no room for questions and answers, merely a sterile, standard e-mail. It sent a message bigger than any press release could.

In many ways, Peter Gelb has preached a glasnost and a perestroika since he assumed the title of general manager of the Met in 2006. Certain aspects of the company’s operations were shifted—the absorption of the company’s in-house opera shop (previously run separately by the Metropolitan Opera Guild), clearance for singers on the company roster to perform at the annual Richard Tucker Gala—and a greater openness was fostered by introducing the Met Live in HD, a program that exposed the house’s guts and gears—in HD no less—to cinema-goers worldwide.

“I intend to honor [the Met’s] great traditions and its loyal audience while hopefully arriving at the right formula of exciting new artistic initiative that will fill its seats well into the future,” Gelb said at a company news conference (back when the company still had news conferences) prior to assuming directorship in 2006. (Similarly, President Putin promised in this month’s inauguration speech that “I will do everything to justify the trust that millions of our citizens have placed in me. I see the whole sense and purpose of my life as being to serve our country and serve our people, whose support gives me the inspiration and help I need to resolve the greatest and most complex tasks. . . . We are ready for the tests and accomplishments ahead. Russia has a great past and just as great a future. We will work with faith in our hearts and sincere and pure intention.”)

It turns out the greatest tradition Gelb has honored, however, is that of making the Met a continually closed edifice. The brilliantly lit corners we see of the house in simulcast are just that: Corners in a far larger institution. Nearly four years after his optimistic proclamation from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, Gelb sang a different tune. While he conceded in 2009 to the New York Post that opera fans “have every right to be” opinionated, he groused about the criticisms he had recently received in that time, primarily lobbed towards the company’s controversial Tosca. “I hope they will evaluate the Met in the context of a whole season. And if they still hate what we’re doing, I’m going to be trying my hardest to continue to do what I am doing, because I believe it’s the only way to go.”

The crossroads between criticism and public accountability have proven to be the toughest pills for Gelb to swallow. His rhetoric in what interviews he does give (and those have been fewer and fewer over the last six years) has become more defensive. Responses to questions are full of what he’s not doing: “My intention is not to try to slap the audience in the face. I’m not trying to do that,” he told the Washington Post in 2010, later adding in the same interview that “I’m not trying to reinvent anything.”

This defensiveness is where Gelb and Putin diverge. When asked about the hot-button topic of notorious Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya’s 2006 murder, the Russian president merely sniffed that she was “a person of no importance.” Such a dismissive response may not have squelched the rampant speculation that the politician did play some part in the journalist’s grizzly demise, but it certainly kept many outspoken voices mum.

Conversely, Gelb has been making headlines in recent months for his own clashes with journalists. Per a statement made to the New York Times earlier this month, he argued that a WQXR blog post critical of the Met’s new Ring Cycle and a subsequent Times profile on Gelb “was objectionable… an awful and nasty piece, which in my opinion was totally unjustified.” Less than 24 hours after it was published, the piece disappeared from WQXR’s website.

Similarly, news broke on Monday that Opera News,the in-house publication for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, would no longer run reviews of Met productions. The general director told the Times yesterday that he was not a fan of the publication “passing judgment” on productions put on by the same company the publication’s parent organization was created to support.

Whether or not that’s true (and certainly, the oft-quoted line from Brian Kellow’s May column in the magazine, “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them,” is indeed not helping anyone with the initials “PG”), the muzzling couldn’t have been more ill-timed, happening one month following the WQXR debacle and in a realm of memory still smarting from the disappearance of blogger Brad Wilber’s Met Futures page.

In fact, it’s the Wilber case that smarts the most, nine months later. Both WQXR and Opera News have business partnerships with the Met that create more shades of grey than an E.L. James page-turner. Wilber, however, was an independent blogger whose website culling repertory and casting information for upcoming Met seasons included a disclaimer that his information should be considered speculative and that neither the author nor the website was affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera. The website went uncontested for nearly 15 years until the company’s general counsel requested it be taken down last year. Wilber’s website offered no criticism or snide jabs, just the earnest support of an eager fan.

At the time, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told the New York Observer at that time that as “a general matter the Met has no legal right to control what is said about it unless the material published is libelous or written in a way to suggest falsely that the Met itself is the author. Material in the public domain may freely be described so long as the copyright laws are adhered to and non-defamatory material from sources may be published whether or not it was confirmed.” The Met has yet to take significant action against artists who list upcoming production dates on their personal websites, often preempting season announcements.

In the last few weeks, numerous people have across all manner of media mentioned Gelb and Putin in the same breath. Both deny significant problems in their respective purviews, both have strained relationships with the press (indeed, both would probably just prefer that the press didn’t exist), both are preaching a time of openness that is in truth becoming more silenced and stilted than it was in the 1970s and early 80s, both are folically challenged.

But here’s the big, glaring difference: Vladimir Putin runs one of the largest countries in the world. Peter Gelb runs an opera company. Yes, there are consequences should either of these ships sink under their respective captains, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s the difference between the sinking of the Titanic and the sinking of a family yacht. Which makes the current leadership crisis at the Met all the more deleterious. While James Levine slinks further and further into disability leave and an impending retirement, Gelb has made it clear that “I am making all artistic decisions here.”

And, to be fair, some of those artistic decisions have paid off most handsomely. Though it’s perhaps mordantly ironic that two of the Met’s greatest coups under Gelb—a new production of Shostakovich’s The Nose and an imported wonder of Janacek’s Siberia-set From the House of the Dead—reinforce the company’s soviet environment. And, curiously, when Rene Pape made his Met role debut as Boris Godunov, he did so for the first time not as a Putin-esque figure, but as a historical tsar. That production, crippled as it was by a last-minute artistic switchup after initial director Peter Stein felt that Gelb was being unsupportive in his request to get an American work visa to helm the show, fell flat without a definitive vision. It was, like so many supposedly “cutting-edge” productions of the New Met, buried and beholden to tradition.

In such instances, it’s tempting to paraphrase another Putin quote: “Whoever does not miss the Volpe era has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”

Of course, applied in retrospect to the great white hope that washed over Lincoln Center in 2006, perhaps another Putin maxim is even more disturbing and apropos: “Nobody should pin their hopes on a miracle.”

“Lenny Abramov,” a journalist who writes frequently about the Met, has chosen to use a pen name on this occasion.

See you there, cher public! Latest coverage begins after the jump.  

4:10: Here’s the complete Season Press Release and the 2010-11 Repertory and Casting complete as of today.

4:00: Over at the Rubinstein Atrium now, where the WiFi is free and (more to the point) operating. A summary of what’s up at the Met next season is on the Times website, scoopers that they are.

Some impressions of the event: it was VERY well attended. List Hall was packed, with people standing in the rear, though some of these were Met (press office and some video, photographers, etc.)

Peter Gelb is most comfortable working from prepared notes. It’s a bit of a fool’s errand asking him a searching, penetrating question as he is just going to duck it anyway. At least he is pleasant and civil in his evasiveness.

The mood seemed a lot more optimistic than last year, even though they seem to have 86ed the idea of having singers from next season’s productions making a personal appearance. (This is perhaps because by far the most engaging of the personalities at least year’s event was Angela Gheorghiu, who, well, you know how that turned out.)

The look of next season seems sort of cautiously modern; the Boris, Traviata and Don Carlo look fairly plain, open-boxy. We didn’t get any look at the Comte Ory, just the Sher talk, and the discussion with Lepage suggests he is not one of the world’s great talkers, not much more than that. It did seem that he has a solid grasp of what he wants to do with the Ring, and in this venue at least he is very respectful of the work. Idea I hd not heard before (Lepage): “In an opera production, the conductor is in control of time, and the director of space.”

I met Margaret Juntwait, who is quite charming in person, sort of a very scaled down version of her radio personality.

I apologize for the connectivity thing, cher public: next year, 3G for backup for sure.

Back to Sunnyside.

3:30: As is traditional at these events, the WiFi cut out the minute Peter Gelb started his introduction. I’ll continue to type, we’ll get this online as soon as possible

James Levine 40th anniversary will be marked with releases of CDs, DVDs and a tour to Japan.

Seven new productions, 11 HD telecasts.

A clip from the Carmen HD (as seen by 360,000 audience members.)

The new productions are as predicted before: Rheingold, Walkure, Boris Godunov, Don Carlo, Traviata, Nixon in China and Le Comte Ory. Joyce DiDonato is in the Ory.

We also will see other directors on video.

Maestro Levine: Going into my 40th season. During the first three seasons working with PG, the effort to build a new audience required refocus, hard work. One of the things most striking: conducting roster is best in JL’s memory. The future looks very bright. One other thing: the Ring. Really a new Ring, a new way of dealing with this story that has never been seen before, but it does deal with the story in great detail. “This may be very, very wonderful.”

PG: 2011-2012 first cycle of Ring. The construction of the Ring set (more machine than set).

“Impressionistic” video of some of the ideas of the design for the Lepage Ring. There will be acrobats on bungee cords and flying on rings. Robert Lepage is live on video from Vancouver.

RP offered the Ring several times before, never felt companies could commit to time & resources necessary. “The big story is always an echo of the small story.” He brings singers as close to the audience as possible. Spectacle in the background points to the small story in the foreground. Designs and staging will push voices forward, singer-friendly. The set is a living thing that breathes (metaphorically, one hopes.). Meeting between traditional stagecraft and state of the art technology, in the spirit of the motifs of the Ring, constantly reinventing and blending set elements. Coups de theatre are created organically. His take based on imagery of the Icelandic Eddas; some of the costumes will recall the first production at Bayreuth which also reflected this source material. The Ring is not “Avatar.”

Levine seems genuinely enthusiastic about the stagecraft.

Theatermania.com: is this the most expensive production the Met has ever done? PG: Ours is less expensive than the one in Los Angeles. Since it’s all contained in one giant piece of scenery, it’s not significantly more expensive than (say) four Boris Godunovs.

Video presentations of new productions. Peter Stein top of Gelb’s list of directors to be invited to the Met.

Nicholas Hytner directs the Don Carlo (this is as seen at Royal Opera, met is a co-producer).

Willy Decker directs Traviata. Entire chorus is dressed as men. The set is being redesigned for the proportions of the Met proscenium. Decker: “A set has to be a clear background for strong characters.” Dr. Grenvil is onstage almost through entire production because he represents mortality. The production is otherwise tightly focused on Violetta as “outcast.”

“Nixon in China” is Peter Sellars’ overdue debut at the Met. One hates to say this but in middle age Sellars is looking a lot like a pineapple. “What distinguishes the performances of Maddalena and the others is that they are so humane.” “Nixon in china coming to the Met is sweet, we made it as an anti grand opera, and now at the Met it can be genuinely grand.”

PG: very supportive intro of Bart Sher.

BS re Comte Ory: “Dessert at the end of the meal. A French pastry made by an Italian chef. The most beautiful music Rossini ever wrote: the trio.

Questions: Will any new opera achieve the popularity of Boheme or Tosca?
PG: Always looking for ways to revitalize standard repertory. There isn’t enough repertory.

Question: Are there any singers or conductors you still want to go after?
Always looking. Nina Stemme a holdout for many years, we’re working on her. Cecilia Bartoli we would love to have back at the Met, not for lack of trying.

Q: Levine’s take on reception to Tosca?
Levine: i don’t have a take. My mind is in a development state; some things I live, other things I don’t like so much. I prefer for people to use their own mind and feeling, not “Jimmy said this.”

Q: Are we ready to tolerate a production of Traviata that strips away everything? Can’t adjust to the lack of romance.
PG: Many Americans saw this at Salzburg, liked it. If we didn’t think audiences would like it, we wouldn’t bring it here.

JL: We asked Peduzzi and Bondy for original work, not something they did before. It’s very important to let artists work and for me it isn’t always about agreeing with what they do.

PG: We are not about “minimalism” – we are after productions that tell the story well.

Q: How has the success of HD productions changed “what you tell directors” because of closeups, etc.

Levine: HD is clearly live, but medium is electronic. Artists don’t change what they do for it; the point is for the HD to pick up what we are doing. If anything, the HD day only increases he sense of occasion. The company, under huge continuous pressure, rise to the occasion magnificently.

PG: The Met is too complicated, with limited amount of time: we can’t rework productions for HD. What we do is this: after production has opened, we analyze how HD will do “reportage” of the live performance.

Q: Is operating budget reduced in current climate?
PG: Most of budget is function of costs we have no control of (unions, etc). We have made millions of dollars in cuts.

JJ and La Cieca will edit all this stuff a little later, but now you know!

2:07: A hush falls over the house. Not really. But first tidbit is: 11 HD telecasts in 1010-2011.

2:00: And here we are. Recognized are Bartlett Sher, director of next season’s Le Comte Ory, and Mercedes Bass, who presumably is not directing anything, but still.

No guarantees on any of this, but if you have ideas for questions to be asked at the presser, email to lacieca@parterre.com.

Back in 15 minutes!

Okay, La Cieca has sifted all the evidence thus far, and she has done Pravda-style scrutiny of what was said and what was left unsaid (particularly by Peter Gelb) in the most recent New York Times analysis of the issue, and ignoring the most recent Jeremiads from Rome on account of the fact that pretty much everybody has come to the conclusion that Franco Zeffirelli is gaga.  She’s added into the mix a couple of emails she’s received recently from Met insiders who will remain anonymous. And she’s come to a conclusion, so, Lady Margaret, if you would be so kind as to ask your guests please to gather in the billiards room? Thank you.

Now, before the lights suddenly go dark and a shot rings out, fatally wounding your girl detective and thus silencing her forever, La Cieca will share with you the fruits of her deductive reasoning. To wit:

When the Met makes its belated announcement of the 2010-2011 season, the repertoire will include a revival of the Zeffirelli production of Tosca, but no Bondy. The reason given will be the size and complexity of the new productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, with perhaps some indication that the original notion was to revive Bondy alone or in alternation with Zeffirelli. But, financial conditions being what they are, the Met cannot afford that particular extravangance, which is of course a pity, because we remain fully committed to the Bondy production which we continue to regard as a success. And so forth.

Once the numbers are finally crunched, cool heads will prevail, deciding that the face-saving provided by a revival of the Bondy is simply too expensive a proposition.

It’s a limb, but La Cieca’s going out on it.

There’s mystery, intrigue, pithy quotations from Peter Gelb, ungracious maundering from Franco Zeffirelli, plus of course that stuff about next season’s Tosca you previously gleaned from parterre.com two weeks ago, last week, and today.  [NYT]

Excellent all around, Patrice Chéreau’s From the House of the Dead is a new high-water mark for the Met.  From the first chords to blackout, the director’s humanist, precise staging excels at capturing that ineffable sense of theatre and event. Janacek’s bleak opera is also in his sweet spot, coinciding with the director’s own favorite themes – the elusiveness of love and the mysteries of intimacy. 

Just a few years ago, Chéreau staged Cosi fan tutte for the Paris Opera, and seemed at loose ends. The scenic design for that production  - a rehearsal hall made of grey concrete with the repressive Vietato Fumare! stenciled onto the rear of the stage - was similar visually to this new production. (The use of text is an auteur touch for Chéreau; his 2006 film Gabrielle also uses onscreen text as a plot commentary. In From the House of the Dead, the supertitles are projected onto various parts of the set.) But in Cosi Chéreau seemed to be superimposing existential drama onto an essentially comic plot, and the results were muddy.

Chéreau’s approach to From the House of the Dead is more refined in tone and emotionally right, and he shows himself to be a gentle, artful conciliator of some dramatically tricky material. The ensemble scenes touchingly document the varieties of intimacy these men experience in the harsh reality of their imprisonment. A wounded eagle that has taken refuge in the prison is, in Chéreau’s hands, a toy – an object onto which these men project their own hopes of healing. In the pantomimes for the two orchestral prison plays, he uses bawdy sexual humor, both for levity and to suggest a more desperate kind of commerce inside the jail. Disposing of intermissions (an archaic convention?) he links the three acts with two surprise theatrical devices, both of them strikingly effective – the first, a kind of disaster, possibly symbolic of futility; the second, a huge black curtain like a ship’s sail, foreshadowing death.

From the House of the Dead is overwhelmingly a director’s opera because of its large ensemble, and because it favors a speech-like setting of the text above any display of purely musical values.  It was safe in the hands of the extremely collaborative yet decisive Chéreau, who drew on his long experience in French experimental theater and film to integrate its patchwork scenes into a cohesive narrative.

The enormous cast features Peter Mattei, Eric Stoklossa, Willard White, and Kurt Streit, and at least a dozen smaller parts, in addition to a large men’s chorus and non-singing actors. Both the excellent lighting design, by newcomer Bertrand Couderc, and the concrete gulag set by Richard Peduzzi, explored subtle shades of grey. The appropriately drab and institutional costumes, by Caroline de Vivaise, suggested uniforms of the prisoner or Nazi variety without being too specific

Mattei connected brilliantly to the role of Shishkov, the tormented man who killed for love. Is it unfair to say that he sang almost too mellifluously, where some growl may have been more believable? Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his Met debut, got mostly precise playing from the Met Orchestra, though they sounded under-rehearsed in places, with spotty intonation in the difficult close-harmony violin writing. His reading of score, characteristically cool and detached, produced a robust and agile accompaniment throughout.

From the House of the Dead, co-commissioned with the Festival Aix-en-Provence, was produced in Europe and filmed for DVD there before coming to New York. [Following up on operabitch's comment below, and in the interest of accuracy: it's a "production of the Metropolitan Opera and the Wiener Festwochen, in co-production with Holland Festival, Amsterdam; the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; and Teatro alla Scala, Milan." - LC] The re-staging here must have commanded an enormous amount of resources and rehearsal time. Percussive and episodic, it lacks the sweep and lyricism that make Jenufa and Kát’a Kabanová repertory staples since the 1990s Janacek craze, and it is not likely to match their popularity. Monday night’s audience, younger and hipper than usual, received the performance with cautious enthusiasm, but the atmosphere was somewhat that of a succès d’estime.

It would be gratifying to see Chéreau get his hands on a Met production of a standard repertoire work with a greater musical appeal. Though this production represents the best of Peter Gelb’s intentions for the New Met, a fringe piece like From the House of the Dead cannot define the company. This leads one to wonder how sustainable such endeavor might be for a company that produces so much opera as they do, and whether it is fair to expect this quality of work from other new productions this season.

We’ll find out soon. Les Contes d’Hoffmann, in a new production by Barlett Sher, will open December 3. Carmen, opening December 31,  is the next popular repertory piece to be replaced since Luc Bondy’s Tosca opened the season. The incumbent Carmen, a familiar and effective Franco Zeffirelli warhorse, will be missed by many, and director Richard Eyre has his work cut out for him.

Chéreau’s production shares a lot of ingredients with Luc Bondy’s embarrassing Tosca: the director’s French inflection, the same set designer, slovenly costumes, a lugubrious air, dingy lighting, and simulated onstage sex. But if Tosca’s vapid avant-garde clichés raised the alarm that the Met’s Peter Gelb might be miring the company in trendiness, From the House of the Dead reassuringly suggests that the same sensibility can also yield a terrific show.

La Cieca’s fan of Justin Davidson‘s writing (though not all the time), but I don’t get the point of using a rave review as an excuse for axe-grinding.

Or what do you think, cher public?

Luc Bondy came off as a serious artist who either has run out of particularly interesting things to say in his work or else (maybe more likely) not a good fit for directing Tosca. Neither he nor Chéreau are in any sense opera queens, which is maybe more off-putting to other people than it is to me.

Bondy did say that he thought (and he seemed to be weighing his words carefully here) that Tosca is a “wonderful and awful” opera with some “completely stupid” moments: a “good, thrilling” piece but a “trivial” story. The weak moments of the opera can be glossed over, like bad food with a rich sauce, which Bondy said was, as he understood it, Zeffirelli’s approach. (The takeaway snipe of the evening was in reference to the Zef: “He should remember Puccini wrote this opera, not Zeffirelli.”)

He wanted, he said, to try for a “human” approach, to make the action more believable. This is the source of Tosca’s finding the knife early, for example: Bondy feels that as written the melodrama is too “convenient.” He added that he did not realize that in New York Tosca was like the Bible.

A lot of back and forth about booing, and Chéreau was rather gallant here in recalling the Bayreuth Ring, though it’s scary to think that this was now 33 years ago! (Scary to me, I mean. He seemed all right with it.) Nobody wants to make a scandal, they all assured us, what they try to do is to tell the story. Bondy did say that the audience reaction was not particulary important because by the time the audience sees the production, his work is completely done.  He added a funny analysis of why booing sounds so loud even when only a few people do it: the “r” in “bravo” interrupts the sound, whereas the “oo” in boo projects very well.

Bartlett Sher was a little more PC and, in the American style, very verbal about his concept for Les Contes d’Hoffmann. His point of departure is Offenbach’s outsider status as a Jew; he sees Hoffmann’s successive romances as attempts at assimilating into mainstream society. The production for the Met will have something of a 1920s feel because of a connection to Kafka that I didn’t quite get.

Again, Chéreau didn’t have any real “aha!” moments, but he sounded like he was very in touch with From the House of the Dead, how when he first looked at the work he expected a lot of “despair” but was surprised by how “full of hope and life” the work is. He took on directing it because Pierre Boulez asked him to collaborate on the conductor’s last operatic production. (Gelb says he invited Boulez to the Met but he declined.) Chéreau did emphasize that the Met production was not a revival in the conventional sense but rather a reworking of similar ideas, stimulated in particular by the different abilities and qualities of the New York cast, specifically Peter Mattei.

The interlocutor, Paul Holdengräber, got things off to a bit of a grating start for me when he drawled, “As de La Rochefoucauld once said…” and he could have spared us the anecdote about how his father was a claquer in Vienna. But mostly he asked the expected questions about missions and stuff.

Few revelations were forthcoming from Peter Gelb: he wants to build new audiences but not alienate old audiences, he does not believe in scandal for scandal’s sake, success of a production is measure in terms of audience interest over the course of a number of seasons. Some boilerplate about the success of the HD telecasts. The Met standard is the best voices in the world, the finest orchestra, heard in their full glory.

The questions from the audience ran the usual gamut from the incomprehensible to the asinine, but there was at least one good, straightforward query as to the future of the iconic Zeffirelli Bohème. Gelb answered, “There is no production at the Met that will not eventually be redone.”

Please see also the observations of squirrel and rommie. And Daniel Wakin was there too.

The subject of the controversy: that most insidious and invasive attack on American culture since fluoridation or women’s suffrage, operatic stage direction.

The conspirators: the ilk of Peter Gelb, Patrice Chéreau, Luc Bondy and Bartlett Sher, ”instigated” by Paul Holdengräber.

The meeting place: that hotbed of radical thought the New York Public Library (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street).

The offer: you can buy tickets here — if you dare!

Where else? [NYT]

Zachary Woolfe asks the musical question, “Who is this Peter Gelb anyway?” [NY Observer]

So, cher public, those of you who are buying tickets for the Met today. What’s the experience like?

Angela Gheorghiu, not to be outdone by Anna Netrebko‘s cancellation of Violetta in 2010, has just announced that she will not sing Carmen in 2009. According to the Romanian diva’s website, “With deep regret Angela Gheorghiu has to announce that she has to withdraw just from the new production of CARMEN at the MET later this year due to personal reasons. She will appear in the title role as scheduled on April 28 and May 1, 2010.”

UPDATE: It’s official. According to a press release from the Met, Gheorghiu is out of the “first six” performances of Carmen, replaced by Elina Garanca, “who sang the title role of La Cenerentola at the Met last spring to great acclaim.”

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NTPiKa2F5NA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Garanca will withdraw from the Met’s new production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, with Kate Lindsey jumping in as Nicklausse/Muse.

Anna Netrebko will not sing Violetta in New York during the 2010-2011 season, La Cieca has learned. The long-expected La traviata (as discussed on Met Futures and elsewhere) was to be a version of the Willy Decker production the soprano did at Salzburg in 2005.

According to an interview the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Netrebko has decided to pull out for two reasons, a sense of routine in this production she loves so well, and a concern that she might not be as effective in the staging as she was in the well-known DVD release. (That second part at least has the ring of truth.)

The diva goes on to discuss future repertoire for her “new voice” (Anna Bolena and Faust, definitely; Trovatore and Lohengrin, possibly; but not Lulu, even though Barenboim and Decker want her to do it.)

“The Met now presents works by directors like Luc Bondy or Patrice Chereau – the people who worked in Europe 20 years ago and whose work was derided from afar.” Once she gets past the librettese (“derided from afar?”) La Cieca thinks she will like this Nikolaus Bachler. [Deutsche Welle]

The fucking genius of Peter Gelb just opened a new and heretofore unexpected orifice.  Encouraged by the success of the Met’s HD movie broadcasts, The National Theatre in London earlier this evening telecast its production of Phèdre starring Helen Mirren into 300 cinemas around the world. Photo by Catherine Ashmore. [One Cold Hand - NYC]

Twice the negativity from La Cieca apparently works out to something positive, or at least an affirmation of the status quo. Which is to say, according to a source fairly close to the Met, the Robert Lepage production of the Ring is still on. The less than rapturous reception last week at the presentation to the left coast Wagnerians is (probably) nothing to worry about. Apparently the designs were “too early to show,” giving an inaccurate impression that the production is going to be spare or (shudder!) minimalist; on the contrary (says La Cieca’s source) there’s going to be a lot to look at — if not, perhaps, on the eyebending level of today’s earlier YouTube clip. (Above photo by Michael Cooper is from Lepage’s production of Erwartung for the Canadian Opera Company.)

La Cieca has learned from an AGMA member that Peter Gelb has recently written a letter to Met artists asking for a “contribution” of 10% of contracted fees. According to an email from AGMA honcho Alan S. Gordon, this appeal follows a previous more direct request to all Met unions for a 10% reduction in wages.

The email urges AGMA members to “refrain from responding” to Gelb’s letter. Gordon adds that AGMA and other unions have insisted that the Met pay for an audit to determine the “nature and extent” of the Met’s financial problems in order to determine “the extent to which any contributions from AGMA members would help cure those problems.”

AGMA’s current agreement with the Met does not expire until 2011.

La Cieca should emphasize that she is repeating what she is being told here, and she’s always willing to listen to other sides of the story.

(Thanks to Opera Chic!)

La Cieca hears that Sondra Radvanovsky is not, in fact, making her Met farewell this year, but will return to the company in future seasons. Your doyenne is not sure what lesson to take away from this experience: either that whining to the media prematurely makes you look like a fool later on, or else “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

La Cieca’s take on the Met’s new productions for 09-10: unless the Mary Zimmerman Armida turns into something very elaborate indeed, it looks like a return to the dreaded “empty box” syndrome of the 1990s. All the new productions are stripped down unit sets, even the Hoffmann.

Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with a good empty box (see Eugene Onegin) but too many of them the same season tend to make the audience restless, like they’re not getting their money’s worth in geegaws.

It’s scary to think there will be an HD telecast of Turandot with Maria Guleghina.