...and Opera Chic doesn't kiss 'n' tell.
However, last night's La Traviata at the NYC Metropolitan Opera house should have been kicked out of bed long before Act III's Parigi, O cara. In fact, from Violetta's first sign of consumption with Nulla, Nulla...Oh qual pallor, I was hoping that her illness was some new strain of a super-sexy turbo-infected flu, which would cut her down halfway through E' strano! No such luck.
Hei-Kyung Hong’s glaring mispronunciations and topless voice (but not the sexy kind) plagued Violetta's tenuous interpretation. I've seen her Violetta before, and it's never been this bad. Rizzi’s shallow, empty, rushed conducting was criminal. And I’ll just keep it at that. I fear Milan has turned me into a pedantic Verdi snob...halp!
Interestingly enough, only one year has elapsed since I played here in NYC on the home field, and the changes that Gelb has administered post-Volpe-era are immense. From audience to ticket price, it's not only palpable, but visible (mainly via the alarmingly lax dress code, culprit of the new student corps that comprised the audience).
I’ve always been one for accessibility and open dialogue, but I fear that the MET will soon turn into a bit of a joke; a once-sacred hall of operatic history will be relegated in the same league as Broadway. I’ve been reading all the criticism (and equal praise) for Gelb’s new vision, but the impact wasn’t particularly tangible from the outside. Once Gelb has successfully opened the doors to this new edgy clientele that he is so desperately trying to corral, he'll need to improvise a contingency plan to halt cultural degradation.
The MET to me now is like bumping into a previously-hawt ex-boyfriend in a bar, who put on some extra beer-calories and got a funny haircut: you can still see that underlying hawtness, and know that once he gets over that rough-patch and get's his sh*t together, he'll be just fine.