[Dixielandjazz] Something to Think About?

[Stephen G Barbone]

General Manager Peter Gelb has been giving New York City's   
Metropolitan Opera a make over. Some, especially the "traditional"  
opera buffs have booed his productions, most notably the recent season  
opening performance of Tosca, a staple, (or warhorse to put it in our  
terms) of Opera performances worldwide.

IMO, The Met is in a very similar situation to that of many OKOM  
Festivals. Declining audiences, mostly because they are dying off, and  
a lack of new younger audience. So what he has been doing is changing  
the format in a way he hopes will attract new, younger audiences.

The below article, snipped for brevity, tells the story of his efforts  
which have resulted in the increase of the Met's audience and a more  
youthful demographic.

Opera, like Jazz is changing. IMO, neither genre is dying, but rather  
it is we, the older audience that is dying. Something to think about  
concerning the future. If the new, young OKOM bands out there are  
attracting a young audience, then the future of OKOM is in good hands.

And if some OKOM festivals are changing their mix to attract the  
younger folks,, perhaps that is a very good thing.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


NY TIMES - September 27, 2009 - By Charles McGrath

It’s a New Met. Get Over It.
By CHARLES McGRATH
THE METROPOLITAN OPERA opened its 126th season on Monday — Peter  
Gelb’s third as general manager but the first over which he has had  
complete control — with Puccini’s “Tosca,” one of the sturdiest and  
most beloved war horses in the operatic stable. This was very good  
news if you were the sort of traditionalist Met fan who could happily  
watch the old Italian repertory — “Tosca,” “Turandot,” “Madama  
Butterfly” — over and over again, and are not looking forward to  
offerings later this season like Janacek’s “From the House of the  
Dead,” an almost plotless opera set in a Siberian labor camp, or “The  
Nose,” Shostakovich’s adaptation of a story about a man who doesn’t  
have one.

On the other hand, the Met’s new “Tosca,” directed by Luc Bondy and  
designed by Richard Peduzzi, mothballed the nearly 25-year-old Franco  
Zeffirelli production, which though baroquely overstuffed was  
immensely popular with audiences. “Tosca” takes place in some of  
Rome’s most famous landmarks, and the Zeffirelli sets made you feel as  
if you were actually there. By contrast Mr. Peduzzi’s version of the  
church of Sant’Andrea della Valle looks like an enormous brick  
warehouse and features lots of industrial metal and a big red oil  
drum. There were boos from the die-hards on Monday at the end of the  
second act, at the beginning of which Scarpia appears to receive oral  
sex, and even more, along with a small stampede to the exits, at the  
end of Act III. Mr. Gelb listened impassively.

In his office a couple of weeks ago Mr. Gelb said the decision to open  
the new season this way, with a brand-new, pared-down production of an  
opera that was a trademark of the old Met, was “not an accident.” His  
self-proclaimed mission from the beginning has been to revivify an  
institution whose core audience he thinks is rapidly aging itself to  
extinction, by re-emphasizing opera’s theatricality.

“I didn’t understand fully how difficult it was going to be,” he  
added. “I don’t go into a season hoping that just some things will  
work. Everything has to work. The stakes are very high. The Met is at  
a moment when either it will continue to be the leading opera house or  
it won’t. There’s no middle ground.”

To that end he has commissioned new productions, some of works seldom  
seen in New York; signed up new singers, who don’t just “park and  
bark,” as he puts it, but actually act; and recruited directors from  
Broadway, like Bartlett Sher, and the movies, like Anthony Minghella,  
who died last year. Mr. Bondy is a Swiss director of opera and  
theater, and though Mr. Zeffirelli recently called him “third rate,”  
his productions have a reputation for braininess and for stripping  
away clutter. James Levine, the music director of the Met, likened his  
new “Tosca” to a Hitchcock movie.

Mr. Gelb’s program was initially greeted with skepticism, if not  
hostility, by many opera buffs. In his last job, as president of  
Sony’s classical record division, where he recorded an album of arias  
by the soft-rocker Michael Bolton and where his greatest hit was the  
soundtrack for “Titanic,” purists saw him as a shameless panderer. Mr.  
Gelb, who likes to point out that classical music used to be pop  
music, is unrepentant. “I haven’t really changed,” he said. “The only  
thing that changed was the world I was working in. I’ve always tried  
to popularize classical music, and I’m still doing it, only I don’t  
work for a classical record company anymore.”

And whatever his record at Sony, Mr. Gelb’s Met career has by most  
reckonings been an almost immediate success. The audience has both  
grown and become more youthful. He has reached out to contemporary  
visual artists and begun a promising collaboration with André Bishop,  
the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, to develop new work.  
His program of showing selected operas on live high-definition  
television broadcasts has been tremendously popular, filling movie  
theaters both here and abroad.

(Remainder snipped for brevity)