James Fenton in The Guardian weighs-in on the phenomenon of opera house size, and the impressions that they leave with the critics.
In his "Things That Have Interested Me" series, he criticizes the impenetrable Xanadu that the NYC Metropolitan Opera house pervades, and how the vastness of the administration and benefactors have trickled-down and absorbed into the mentality of new productions, leaving an overall impression of quantity, not quality.
"What is crucially missing at the Met, as in most opera houses around the world, is flexibility: a sensible small theatre where new work, together with old work designed for small houses, can be presented without the expenditure of millions of dollars. New work is seldom put on in these mammoth auditoriums, but when it is, it gets money thrown at it with hysterical zeal, in the hope that cash will make up for whatever turns out to be missing from the mix. But the fact that so much cash is flying around only inhibits creativity."
Fenton goes on to use Tan Dun's The First Emperor as an example of this mentality, musing about the paradox: "How to get through an opera in which everything is excellent apart from the music and the words?" Hay Fenton, is this better then?