Tonight marks our final season ticket outing at the Met. We’re off to see Cosi Fan Tutte, and I’ll be back to tell you how it was.
This doesn’t end opera season for us. We’re planning to do rush tix this week for La Cenerentola, which will probably be our last Met outing till the fall. But that’s not all folks. Although the City Opera is dead, opera for the people isn’t. In addition to the cheap seats always available at the Met, there are other options for us latter day groundlings.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring a couple of them. Tomorrow I’m going to the final performance of Haydn’s Orlando Paladino at the Manhattan College of Music in bucolic Morningside Heights. Though we live in the neighborhood, I hadn’t heard a thing about this, until I stumbled onto something in The New Yorker. They need to do a better job of letting the neighbors know. Posters would be nice. It’s a student cast, and it sounds like an interesting take. There aren’t a lot of tickets left, but what they got is going for $30 for regular folk and $15 for students and seniors. The website was a little tricky to manevever. I kept winding up at a link that said the service wasn’t available. However, if you click here to the calendar and from there click onto the May 4th event, you should be able to order tickets for tomorrow’s performance. Selection is limited, so good luck!
The other cool thing we discovered is The New York Opera Exchange, which sounds almost like City Opera on a shoestring. It features emerging artists in interesting productions. They’ve apparently been around since 2012. Performances happen at a couple of different venues. We’re going to be seeing a production of La Traviata because you can never see that one enough times. It’s being performed in midtown at a church. It’s set in “the rubble of post-Mussolini Italy” with Alfredo as an American GI. There are several performances in May. Tickets can be purchased online and all seats are $30. Sounds like fun and I will totally let you know, but since performances start 5/9, and we’re not going till the end of the run, don’t wait for our take.
(Seriously, Marion is busy editing her next great novel, and can hardly afford even the cheap seats these days. There’s no donation link because she’s just too proud, but you could help support her opera habit — and these informative posts– by checking out her work, including this acclaimed novella for less than a buck!)