Just in: Met calls in 2nd deputy for Wozzeck
mainThomas Hampson is still sick with bronchitis.
Matthias Goerne has flown off.
Tonight’s Wozzeck at the Met, we hear, will be hard-working Daniel Sutin.
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Really tough break for Thomas H. In a curious journalistic decision, the NY Times elected to put the rave review of the opening performance, including the “hot news” element of Goerne’s last-hour substitution (and the coincidence of his having just performed the role with the VSO at Carnegie Hall the previous week), on P. 2 of its Saturday Arts Section. On the front page, there was a review of The Tzar’s Bride by Rimsky-Korsakov, directed by the newly-anointed Dmitri Tcherniakov, performed in Milan! Why, I wonder, is Zachary Wolfe’s unstinting praise for Mr. Tcherniakov considered more important than the opening night Wozzeck at the Met with all the attendant excitement of the pinch-hitting for the male lead? Did Mr. Tcherniakov’s management trump Mr. Goerne’s? Any ideas?
Well, Daniel, it might be (but this is just an odd idea of mine), that the Met is not the center of the universe …?
Easy answer, Peter, but the newspaper I referred to is not actually the Universe Times. It is published in New York, read by New Yorkers. The Met puts on productions in New York. Milan is some distance away. The sports section of that paper puts pieces by New York teams in a prominent place and its business section tends to play up news on the New York stock market. And so forth.
Simple. The Met’s revival of Wozzeck is not considered as newsy because it is a revival and a pretty regular part of the Met’s repertory. The met’s recent production of Prince Igor, also by Tcherniakov, was big news recently, and so the premiere of Tzars Bride was given attention because of the controversy surrounding the director’s visionary (or if you disagree, revisionist) Prince Igor two weeks ago.