Culture Chronicle

Opera Companies' Fraught Seasons
The New York Times - May 4, 2010
By Anthony Tommasini

George Steel has just completed his first season as the general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera. That the company had a season at all -- let alone one that offered an important revival of a challenging contemporary American opera, Hugo Weisgall's "Esther," and an inventively updated, sexy production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" -- is a real achievement. A year ago the possibility that the City Opera, crippled by a gnawing deficit and a leadership crisis, might fail seemed all too possible.

Last weekend, while hosting VOX 2010, the company's annual contemporary American opera lab at New York University's Skirball Center, Mr. Steel seemed in his element. As he introduced concert performances of excerpts from 10 diverse new operas, he boasted of the City Opera's "turnaround season" and discussed plans for 2010-11.

Meanwhile Peter Gelb, the ambitious general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, is coming off his own significant season, the first that he planned from start to finish, in conjunction with the music director James Levine. (It ends on Saturday.) He has also been grappling with deficits, cutbacks and, through no one's fault, an exceptionally high rate of artist cancellations because of illness.

Although the Met's current annual operating budget of roughly $300 million is about 10 times that of the City Opera, Mr. Steel and Mr. Gelb face similar concerns. They are also, understandably, facing critical scrutiny. Whatever may be going on in their board rooms and budget meetings, what matters to opera buffs is what happens on their stages. For the full article, click here