Recognition

Who would have thought four years ago, as the house opened to the general director's famous favorites making dull nonsense of a Pushkin-Tchaikovsky masterpiece that the unbroadcast, unhyped revival later that first week would be
such a triumph as to demand a return in better clothes and with better secondary cast? (Unfortunately the conductor is no longer Riccardo Frizza but the workmanlike Carlo Rizzi.)

Yet here we are. About a decade after the rumor that Gelb was/wanted to drop non-Fleming Americans circulated (and though they weren't dropped, neither has his interest in importing chilly Europeans), Sondra Radvanovsky - an American whose name recognition has lagged her vocal-artistic significance - is headlining opening night at the Met.