"This is a bloody war, man."

@alexrossmusic has undusted an assessment of the 1980's era Met written by Peter G Davis for New York Magazine, back when magazines (other than The New Yorker) bothered to cover things like that. It's pretty fascinating: casting problems, production problems, budget deficits, and a critics' roundup of...shall we say disenchantment? with the then-new Ring production. Grim grim grim.

These days, though some things remain the same, it's not so much a bloody war as a series of skirmishes.

one man's band

Here's the American Masters profile of James Levine.  Doesn't say anything new, and leaves out quite a bit (uh, the BSO, for one), and ends up being pretty thumbnail on the whole, not to say delicately hagiographic in a Met marketing dept. kind of way, but I suppose if you only have an hour...

Augury defied

Win a few, lose a few.  Last summer at lunch it was predicted that if Levine had to choose one, he'd go for Boston -- so much more to do there that hadn't yet been done. What more was there to do at the Met, really?  But, as a late beloved uncle once described his new set of wheels, "It drives like a fur-lined bathtub" (and you have to imagine that said in a hyper-genteel Virginia accent to get the full effect). Old campaigner that Levine is, he's surely earned the right to pick his battles.  But I do sort of wish he'd chosen the Field of Tanglewood.