NY reviews of the Met are like ‘collaborationists greeting an occupying force’

Joe Horowitz has filleted some wonderful quotes in his Wall Street Journal review of Conrad L Osborne’s magisterial new survey of the present state of opera in America.

We like this one, in particular:

The penultimate chapter of Opera as Opera is a 25-page set piece reviewing one of the Met’s most admired productions of recent seasons: Borodin’s Prince Igor as reconstituted in 2014 by the director Dmitri Tcherniakov. Mr. Osborne: “[It] sold out the house and generated an astoundingly acquiescent critical . . . response of a sort you’d expect from collaborationists greeting an occupying force. . . . That this takedown of a production and sadsack performance should stir not a whiff of dissent, not a scrap of controversy, is a mark of a dead artform.”

It would be a shame if this killed Osborne’s chances of a review in the New York Times.

Read on here.