The Other Met: Less of the Divine Levine, More Small Print

CultureGrrl is an operaphile, attending several Metropolitan Opera performances every year since I was in my 20s (and I won’t tell you how long ago that was).
But ever since we had to share conductor James Levine with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, things just haven’t been the same. I should preface this by saying two things: I feel blessed to have lived during the Levine era—surely the Golden Age of Met conducting. And I’m a Saturday-night operagoer, because attending weeknights, for my hardworking husband, guarantees a very expensive nap.
I just received my season brochure for ordering individual performances, and there’s just one Saturday night performance, a Feb. 24 “Magic Flute,” that Levine will conduct. Guess how many Saturday nights he’ll be presiding over the Boston Symphony?
Ten.
I’m not particularly interested in opera performances led by the second-tier conductors that (for the most part) the Met has lately been engaging, and I won’t go to a warhorse that I’ve already seen several times, unless it’s exceptionally well cast. So, if you look in the Dress Circle boxes, you may see me at a couple of Saturday matinées: Tan Dun‘s “The First Emperor” (conducted by the composer) and Christoph Willibald Gluck‘s “Orfeo ed Euridice” (Levine). My one Saturday night may be the Richard Strauss rarity, “Die Ägyptische Helena,” with Deborah Voigt as Helen of Troy.
Levine shrank in size while recovering from his recent rotator-cuff injury, and so did the print in the Met’s brochure. The names of conductors and performers are in a miniscule, faint font, unfriendly to the aging eyes of the Met’s demographically farsighted audience.
All this helps to explain why you will be able to see my husband and me on eight Saturday nights this season at the NY Philharmonic. Music director Lorin Maazel will be conducting only three of those performances, but with names like Riccardo Muti, Colin Davis, Kurt Masur and David Robertson, who’s complaining?
Peter Gelb, do you read me?