At the Metropolitan Opera press conference this morning, Peter Gelb revealed that attendance is up nine percent from last season, after five years of decline; that 61 performances have so far sold out (as opposed to 22 in 2005-6); and — amazingly — that Saturday's movie-theater broadcast of Onegin ranked #8 in Canadian box office last weekend. Of next season's offerings, I'm looking forward to Philip Glass's Satyagraha, directed by the Improbable theater company; Adrian Noble's production of Macbeth; Mary Zimmermann's Lucia di Lammermoor, starring Natalie Dessay; and Stephen Wadsworth's Iphigénie en Tauride, with Susan Graham and Plácido Domingo. I'm unhappy that a revival of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy has been dropped in favor of the musically inferior First Emperor, but the Met has reason to make the change: it may be a dry run for a tour of China. More details at the Met site and La Cieca.
