Look to the rainbow
“Even Peter Gelb’s critics concede that he has had a long run of finding pots of gold,” says The New York Times of the Metropolitan Opera‘s dire money troubles. “But is he running out of rainbows?”
Peter Gelb
Peter’s arabian nights
The moral stench seeps through Peter Gelb‘s decision to partner with the Saudi government, but what new sources of funding for the Met don’t have red flags?
Jaundiced view
Richard Lynn bravely asks what we’re hoping to get out of the continued Peter Gelb-bashing — and whether our expectations of him have ever been fair
The Met offers a tradeoff
The catch: Employees would have to agree to a 30 percent cut in pay, half of which would be restored once the Met’s box office returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Hoarders
“Gelb said the Ring probably will return in five or six years…”
Suit yourself
La Cieca just received a package of pdf files the sender says is a copy of James Levine‘s lawsuit against the Met.
Geh such dir die Stars vom vergangenen Jahr!
Tristan has been the season-launching opera three times before now, but good luck finding someone to provide a firsthand account of the last time.
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2016-2017 season!
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.
The toothless tiger rules the restless jungle
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.
Let the shortfall! When it crumbles we will stand tall, face it all together
“In a fiscal year that challenged the nation’s largest performing arts organization to find a more sustainable financial model for the future, the Metropolitan Opera incurred an estimated $22 million budget shortfall for the 2013-14 season.”
The seven percent solution
You figured it out a fortnight ago, cher public.
Fun with graphs
La Cieca has come into possession of an interesting presentation, with fonts and everything, from Local 802, American Federation of Musicians, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, outlining their solution for the current financial crisis at the Metropolitan Opera.
Séance on a partly cloudy afternoon
Your conduit to the spirit world, La Cieca, isn’t feeling quite as clairvoyante as usual today, cher public, so she’s going to ask your help in predicting what will happen in the course of the Met’s current labor negotiations.
War zone
Alan Gordon, embedded journalist, reports from inside the first AGMA/Met negotiation session.
Rumors addressed
Peter Gelb sent out an email to the “Public Bulletin Board” earlier today, noting that “inaccurate rumors [are] flying around” and attempting to clarify the Met’s position on upcoming union negotiations.
The Met: What is to be done?
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
Spring breakers
Alan Gordon has mass emailed AGAM again, and La Cieca’s got a copy of the missive.
The Met: Can it be saved?
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
The Met: what’s really wrong?
The Met’s financial challenges are not meteorological, demographic, or cyclical; they are structural.
Fog lifts over channel
“When you read, and credit, the more feverish musings of the internet chatterati, there is some kind of British invasion storming the bastions of American opera.”
Transparency
Opera Teen (pictured, second from left) is not kidding us: he had an interview with Peter Gelb.
Encouraging young things to grow
La Cieca has reviewed the parterre circulation numbers and she is delighted and not a little perplexed to note that the day of the Great Opera News Kerfuffle provided our site with the highest number of pageviews in history.
ENO is enough
The repertory for the upcoming season of the English National Opera (also known as “Peter Gelb‘s shopping list”) boasts the world premiere of a new opera by Philip Glass, The Perfect American, which imagines the last days of Walt Disney.
Teaching moment
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
