My main topic today is Verdi’s Macbeth, which opened the 2026-27 season of the Metropolitan Opera on September 22 (I saw the third performance, on September 29). But first, a few notes on two closely related subjects—the present condition of orchestral playing, and some similarities and dissimilarities between opera and ballet, as revealed by recent local examples of each.
On the orchestras: some of you may have seen Joseph Horowitz’s splendid article, “Dudamel’s New York Dream,” in the Oct. 8th issue of the New York Review of Books. Horowitz’s focus is naturally where his title suggests, Gustavo Dudamel’s arrival as music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, along with the first performance events of that collaboration and the relationship between orchestra and community that Dudamel envisions. But as several of Horowitz’s books will testify, no one knows the history of American orchestras better than he, and there is enough of that in his piece—as well as of comparison with the state of European orchestras—to provide a rich context. Further, in a footnote he refers readers to “. . . a series of eight posts, including responses from conductors and orchestral musicians, on my blog, Unanswered Question, at www.artsjournal.com/uq.” These include podcasts. (Here is one precise link. And here is another.) This series, plus the NYRB article, constitutes the best-sourced, most thoughtfully evaluated consideration of “The big picture . . . of American orchestras in crisis” that I know of. I trust I need not underline the significance of that for operatic music-making.
My thoughts on ballet were kicked off by a recent performance of George Balanchine’s Jewels by the New York City Ballet. The first thing to strike me, as it had at an NYCB Swan Lake a couple of years back, but more forcefully this time, was the contrast between the front-of-house atmosphere at the David H. Koch Theatre and what we have experienced across the corner at the Met in recent seasons—an airy, civilized one at the Koch versus one of cramped crowd control at the Met. And the second was the distinct difference in the audience feel, the “pan-psychic” sense of engagement that pervades an auditorium during performance. At Jewels the audience, which was of mixed age and included many children (this was a Sunday matinee), was clearly on intimate terms with the work and with the participatory protocols of the artform, like the spatterings of applause upon the exits of soloists and pairs as the music plays on. A feeling of ongoing pleasurable anticipation for things in the offing hung in the house, little of which carried over to the Met’s Macbeth audience. That gathering skewed noticeably older and was, on first appearances, attentive enough. But as the performance progressed, an atmosphere of passive reception or submission and, by a long-delayed intermission time, even a certain sullenness, had set in. (For reasons that might pertain to this particular event, see below.) These are all things that surely affect our receptivity toward a performance, especially when experienced repeatedly, and must perforce reflect the relative intensities of a sense of crisis attendant on these great artforms, far more heated for opera than for ballet—though no classical artform is cruising carefree. As to the art itself: