RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 9 2 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R On 7 May 2017 New York’s Metropolitan Opera o≈cially celebrated with a gala evening the fiftieth anniversary of performances in the ‘‘New Met,’’ a term employed in its initial years to distinguish the current building at Lincoln Center from the 1883 ‘‘Old Met,’’ the ‘‘yellow brick brewery’’ at Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan. That first, 1966–67 season is also o≈cially celebrated by a box of CDs titled The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary Met Performances from 1966–67 (Met Opera B01LYTT7LP, 22 CDs). This o≈cially produced set contains recordings of nine radio broadcasts and the soundtrack from the televised opening night, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, as well as an additional CD of excerpts from seven other broadcasts. Each opera but one has its own two-CD cardboard container with a booklet and illustrations; Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is on three CDs. Also included is a booklet containing more photos and a brief, graceful essay by Barbara Haws, the Met’s current historian. The Met has issued such boxes before, as with their 2013 pair of Verdi at the Met (Sony, B00DWOUY3Y, 20 CDs) and Wagner at the Met (Sony, B00AL6SM0S, 25 CDs), and they have fixed here those sets’ problem of too-snug openings for their CDs. But this is the first Met set devoted to one season only. 1 9 3 R It may be claimed that the 1966–67 season was exceptional as well as historic. There were nine new productions, two of which were of American operas commissioned for the opening season. Old favorites were moved to the new house, many with star performers new and old: Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Martina Arroyo, Renata Scotto, and Mirella Freni, to name only some sopranos, appeared. The ‘‘Three Tenors’’ had not yet burst onto the Met scene, so one had to make do with Franco Corelli, Richard Tucker, Nicolai Gedda, Jess Thomas, Jon Vickers, James King, and James MacCracken, again naming only some of the singers. And there were great mezzos, baritones, and basses. Conductors were more variable, but Karl Böhm, Thomas Schippers , Zubin Mehta, and Colin Davis all made strong impressions. General Manager Rudolf Bing had reason to be proud. The house itself, which is only glimpsed here in photographs, was not quite what we had wanted or expected. The dimensions at the front and on the sides had to be reduced, so the grand staircase was shortened and not very grand, and the huge Marc Chagall murals at either side of the second level were (and are) just behind the glass at the front and hard to see up close. Inside, the auditorium and stage were as planned, but the decor was both overdone and underdone at once. Each tier of seats was faced by white protruding outcrops that looked like ill-designed automobile grills from the fifties, with gold sashes or ropes draped across the tops and gold corrugations on the bottoms – for the acoustics, we were told. The walls were all covered in outwardly bowed wood from a single African rosewood tree that looked exactly like formica – again for the acoustics. The proscenium surround was nondescript (we missed the old house’s proscenium for the first time), ridged in various unappealing ways, crowned with an awful sculpture unconnected with anything musical, and all brightly gilded – so brightly that it had to be painted darker in succeeding seasons because spotlights and other house lighting created a blinding glare on it. The highlight of the hall was the set of tasteful (Austrian) starburst lighting fixtures, twenty-one of which rose to the scalloped ceiling (gilded, of course) when an opera began. In typical New York fashion, enough was not enough, and clusters of small lights, looking like cheap costume brooches, were added to the 1 9 4 F A U L K N E R Y corrugated bottoms of all the tiers. Everywhere you looked there was glitter...