From an enthusiastic correspondent:
“These are great days and the cast of Tuesday night’s moody, funny, and gloomy Rake’s Progress deserves mention. One can envision the likes of Golda Schultz, Ben Bliss, and Christian Van Horn joining a kind of repertory company with the likes of Sasha Cooke, conquering the classics one by one. Schultz brought down the house with Trulove’s difficult aria, finding the music in the roulades. Bliss made some really beautiful tenor sounds and is to be commended for his stage athleticism. In a face-off between Van Horn and anyone you would care to mention including Rene Pape, I would put my money on Horn. These are incredibly talented young singers. Where do they come from? Bravo to the Met for finding them.
Let us also wonder at the entire season, brilliant new operas and all starting with Fire Shut Up In My Bones and Euridyce, and commend Peter Gelb for convincing Lise Davidsen to supplement her familiar (to European audiences) Ariadne with a ferociously difficult role debut as Chrysothemis. One wonders whether Gelb’s coup involved liberal doses of alcohol or wads of cash left in a tote bag somewhere, but well done!
Opera no more or less than other arts being a sort of cultural parallel to the rise and fall of money, we must shudder at the departure of the audience, which appears to have packed up and moved to the exurbs. We are looking at vast stretches of the auditorium unfilled. So much so that the Met has stopped selling standing room in an misguided belief that it can “steer” audiences to pay more. For whatever reason in the cultural currency of the realm, opera is not commanding prices commensurate with amplified Broadway hit artifices. The only solution in our free market of culture must be an across-the-board price cut — something dramatic and headline-grabbing like 50% — and it must stick for a season or two or three if demand is to rebalance with supply. If that requires cancelation of expensive new productions, so be it; opera cannot exist without an audience.”