Nothing is sacred or unchanging. One of Radio Three’s most reliable sources of musical pleasure, the weekly Saturday opera relay from the Metropolitan in New York, has recently rendered itself all but unbearable. Not in performance standards, which continue a norm of decency and are at best superlative — casting just about the best money can buy, distinguished conducting, wonderful orchestra — but by a surrounding framework of ‘presentation’ so Philistine, vulgar, moronic, as to nullify, even destroy, the essence of what the whole effort purports to convey.
I’ve dipped into most of the current season’s repertoire and been so put off as not to survive the course complete; and heard two operas from start to finish. They could hardly be more different: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, high point of Italian bel canto, often apparently slight and silly in its obedience to every absurd convention of story and idiom, mockable indeed risible if taken in the wrong way, sweetly affecting, indeed moving if taken aright.
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