Posts Tagged ‘The Metropolitan Opera’

In which The Gay Recluse is annihilated by a soundtrack for the recession. When we arrived at Lincoln Center for yesterday’s final dress rehearsal of Tristan und Isolde, we were required to walk through a maze of corridors to find the Metropolitan Opera; this somehow seemed appropriate, as if to demonstrate the point that no […]


Back at work this morning we find our blood still coursing with the slow, oscillating melodies of last night’s third act of Die Walküre at the Met. By the end (and really, by the middle of the first act) it was sublime and transcendent, so that all of our quibbling about the final dress seemed […]


[Note: Click here for our review and revised analysis from opening night.] In musical terms, Friday night’s final dress rehearsal of Die Walküre (and with the understanding that it was just that, i.e., a rehearsal) at the Met seemed problematic; first Jim Morris (Wotan) canceled, which when announced sent the expected sigh of disappointment across […]


On Norma

10Nov07

Yesterday — what luck! — a final dress rehearsal for Norma at the Metropolitan Opera. The first thing we note, incredibly enough, is that the audience on average is even older than the one into which we immersed ourselves the other night at Aida. Can you imagine it? What a rare oasis from capitalism! How […]


Stark and imperial, during the day the white travertine facade of the Metropolitan Opera seems as inviting as a walk across a desert, but at night glows like a beacon to the modern, urban spirit in which it was conceived. The cloud-like apparitions of Chagall’s paintings hypnotize us and soften the disdain of the high roman arches through which we pass […]


Did you not see it? Did you not experience the thrill of David Schwimmer emerging from a limousine to shine his brilliant aura across the travertine plaza to the vaunted Roman arches of the Metropolitan Opera? (How many times have we been enraptured by his finely nuanced work and thought, “If only we could see […]