94 replies to this topic

[dirac]

FromThe Wall Street Journal.

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After huge budget cuts and a damaging labor fight, City Opera is on track this season to balance its budget for the first time since 2000. But it will be years before the company can expand its season to the eight or 10 annual productions it hopes to stage, officials said.

Hanging in there.

[Helene]

It might have an appropriate niche with the current number of productions and the same repertory and size of budget.  There seems to be a bias for it to return to a model that didn't work.

[Helene]

Alex Ross isn't impressed:  in a link Ray posted to the Met Ring discussion thread, Ross wrote:

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Last month, having been priced out of Lincoln Center, the company decamped to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to present “La Traviata” and Rufus Wainwright’s “Prima Donna.” Neither show felt like a turnaround.

http://www.newyorker...s#ixzz1uUUYIQIP

Later in the review he writes in greater detail, concluding:

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This has been the most dispiriting opera season since I began reviewing music in New York, twenty years ago. Although the economic crisis has taken its toll, the problem is less a lack of money than a lack of intellectual vitality. Both the Met and City Opera are committing the supreme operatic sin: they are thinking small.

[abatt]

I'm linking an article from the NY Times regarding the current health of NY City Opera.  The author posits that City Opera shoudl again make its permanent home  at NY City Center.  That is very ironic..  The reason that most visiting ballet companies had to book at City Center was because City Opera occupied the State Theater for 16 weeks per year.  Now many ballet companies have abandoned City Center in favor of the the State (Koch)  Theater, due to the vacancy left by City Opera's  abandonment of the venue.

http://www.nytimes.c....html?ref=music

[dirac]

A quote from the article:

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So where does this leave City Opera for the future? Mr. Steel made inspired choices of works and directors. All four shows were artistically strong. But because City Opera must rent space and build each production to order, it had to crowd its offerings into concentrated periods of two weeks each: the first two at the academy in February; the second two at City Center this month, for a total of just 16 performances.

The books are balanced, the article also says. So the company really is hanging in there, and a bit more than that. A home could only help.