By this point in 2020, nothing should surprise us.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
Disgraced former Met music director James Levinewas sighted at yesterday’s matinee performance of New York City Opera’s Brokeback Mountain.
La Cieca just received a package of pdf files the sender says is a copy of James Levine‘s lawsuit against the Met.
James Levine is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!
The Metropolitan Opera fired James Levine this evening.
James Levine has quietly been slotted into the spring reprise of the Met’s new Tosca.
Our selected Rosenkavalier video overview closes out the 20th-century selections, crosses the millennial mark, and includes the first of our performances to depart from the opera’s prescribed 18th-century setting.
“How many years can you ask your subscribers to see the same production?”
Incoming Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin lavishes praise on former Met Music Director James Levine for actually doing his job, for once.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production of L’Italiana in Algeri for the Met remains steadfastly ignorant of postcolonial theory.
If you’ve been following the coverage of the Nézet-Séguin succession, you will note that a good deal of the coverage centers on whether the incoming maestro will “champion” this composer or that.
“Mr. Levine was conducting his beloved Wagner for what was almost certainly the last time.”
I can scarcely remember a performance where so many conflicting thoughts raced through my mind as happened Thursday night during the Met Orchestra’s “bleeding chunks” of Wagner’s Ring at Carnegie Hall.
The no-star, slapstick revival of John Dexter’s 37-year-old production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail that opened Friday night proved James Levine’s tenure as Music Director of the Met will end in two weeks with neither a whimper nor a bang.
“Maestro James Levine, the Met’s Music Director since 1976, announced that after 40 years in the position, he will retire at the end of the current season, for health reasons,” says the Met press office.
“I will never sing the role again. It was frightful. We were a set of madwomen…There is nothing beyond Elektra. We have lived and reached the furthest boundaries in dramatic writing for the voice with Wagner. But Richard Strauss goes beyond him. His singing voices are lost. We have come to a full stop.”
That Placido Domingo and James Levine, the Met’s inexorable septuagenarians, would team up yet again—on April Fools’ Day, no less—for a revival of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra occasioned an uncomfortable degree of doubt and dread.
The Met’s 2016-2017 season opens on September 26 with a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
“…they hoped he would soon take on an emeritus position that would keep him involved in the company as part of a graceful exit.:
“James Levine, the longtime Metropolitan Opera music director whose health struggles recently brought him to the verge of retirement from that position, has canceled a series of concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra next week.”
“Mr. Luisi won praise replacing Mr. Levine time after time, particularly in a costly version of Wagner’s Ring cycle—though, perhaps in a sign of the situation’s delicacy, the two conductors have never met in person.”
La Cieca thinks she knows who the murderer is.
It’s up to you, cher public, to try to decide for yourself what, if anything, this bizarre story in the New York Times means.
Even when he’s not conducting the production, or, for that matter, even after the production is closed, Maestro Levine remains a presence on the Met’s website.
