Whilst Peter Gelb refuses for the time being to talk about an eventual successor (he says he is “waiting for the conductor’s reactions to a new medical treatment”), more and more invited conductors are being announced for the Met’s upcoming season, in particular to conduct the new productions in the coming season.īeginning in September Simon Rattle (who has not appeared often at the Met) will open the New York institution’s season conducting a new production of Tristan und Isolde by Mariusz Treliński, which moves the libretto to a modern cargo ship, conducting Wagnerian specialist Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in the title roles, alongside Ekaterina Gubanova and René Pape.
In addition to the budget cuts, the Met is also dealing with concerns over the health of James Levine, its musical director and historical conductor, who was operated on several times in recent years and is suffering from Parkinson’s. For the first time since its 2009-2010 season, the Met’s operating budget has dropped below the 300 million dollar threshold (next season the institution will be operating with a budget of 296 million dollars), nonetheless enabling Peter Gelb to announce a 2016-2017 season of 26 different operas, including six new productions (as in the previous season), all featuring impressive casts (despite a few absentees – Jonas Kaufmann has not been announced, after cancelling his involvement in Manon Lescaut at the start of the month). Although the Metropolitan Opera clearly remains a prestigious opera house with one of the great lyric stages, it is well known that the New York institution has in recent years had to make do with a very limited budget – marked by a 22 million dollar deficit in 2014 and just barely in the black by a million dollars for 2015 thanks to the sale of some of its assets, and particularly through drastic cost-cutting measures that are ongoing.
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