QoD

An Alex Ross aside in his review of Cav/Pag in the current New Yorker:

"Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, is phasing out the sumptuously picturesque productions of Franco Zeffirelli...in favor of stagings that echo, very mildly, radical European styles. The outrage that has greeted these efforts is dismayingly reactionary. Gelb has made some poor choices, to be sure, but the basic strategy of artistic renovation is sound. If the Met were to offer nothing but fixed stagings of a fixed canon, it would succumb to terminal atrophy. Not that Europe is so far ahead: all those antic deconstructions are a defense against the boredom of an overfamiliar repertory. The really radical move would be to focus on new opera, as every company did before 1900."

Full text here.