“The quality of operatic programming and production in New York has lately plummeted.... [At the Met] one staging after another has failed to catch fire, and the most ambitious undertaking of the Gelb era, Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Ring, is a very damp squib. New York City Opera, meanwhile, has teetered on the edge of extinction.... The city has, in truth, seldom been on the front lines of operatic art, but it now seems almost peripheral...."
From "Diminuendo," my column in this week's New Yorker.
