Word: bing
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Calling the Tunes. Bing's plus-side rating with the critics, however, has been less spectacular. He has been skewered for "rank ineptness" in casting, "scandalous" deficiency in hiring
...good conductors, "fossilized" repertory, and "anti-Americanism" in the matter of developing new talent. All of which prompts a weary smile from Bing. He responds, characteristically, by criticizing the critics. "Most of the people in our audience," he says, "have better taste than the critics. They know the operas, the singers, and what they want. They are completely uninfluenced by critics-and that annoys the critics so. We can get shocking reviews and you can't get into the house. Critics should be licensed, like doctors." He does not, of course, suggest that singers should be licensed...
...charge that he sometimes miscasts his operas, Bing says: "Casting an opera at the Met is easy. If you want to do a Lucia, then you know you have to get Sutherland. If it's Turandot, then you get Nilsson. Ah, but if you're trying to cast Lucia in Magdeburg, Germany, and you have six sopranos who can sing it, then you have to know something about music." More reasonable is the complaint that Bing has failed to bring along enough first-rate conductors. He contends that "there are few really distinguished conductors around, but the shortage...
Machine-Gunning the House. In the area of repertory, Bing's record at the old Met speaks for itself: 50 new productions, three U.S. premieres (Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Strauss's Arabella, Menotti's The Last Savage), and one world premiere (Barber's Vanessa). His own taste favors Italian opera; he is only lukewarm about Wagner and, with a few exceptions, indifferent to modern. Compared with Milan's La Scala or West Berlin's opera, whose repertories are laced with contemporary works, the Met, as one critic puts it, "remains...
...Bing says, all a matter of economics. "I am behind the times-so is the American public. And they are the people who buy the tickets; the critics get in free. To make successful opera in New York you do Carmen, Boheme and Traviata, and then Traviata, Boheme and Carmen, Stage a modern work and during the third performance you could put on a blindfold, spray the house with a machine gun and be pretty sure that you would never hit anybody...