Word: toure
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When local devotees of the Metropolitan Opera gather this week in Hynes Auditorium to revel in their share of the Met's annual national tour, they will get their money's worth, even at $20 or $25 a seat. They will see and hear first rate singers like Jon Vickers, Regine Crespin, Luciano Pavarotti, Leonie Rysanek, and Sherrill Milnes. They will probably leave with high regard for the Met's artistic standards. They may even be a bit jealous of their New York acquaintances who can stroll down to Lincoln Center, spend astonishingly large amounts of money...
There's no reason for anyone to be jealous. The quality of the singers on the Met tour this year is at least as high as in the New York house--even higher, some might argue. Because of the peculiar financial needs of the modern international opera house, tour audiences like Boston's can now see a concentration of talent in one week that New York audiences have to wait months...
...tour hasn't always been an artistic or financial asset, even as recently as Rudolf Bing's regime. "The tour is the albatross hung around the neck of the manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Eventually, I suppose, it will simply fall off from sheer economic weight... Whatever we do, the tour is artistically a scandal," Bing wrote in his memoirs...
What has happened in the intervening years is that the Met's budgetary troubles have forced a reevaluation of the national tour. It might once have been a luxury that helped bring the Met closer to the national audiences gathered around radios every Saturday afternoon to hear opera broadcasts; it has become--along with the opera blitz on public television--a critical part of the Met's campaign to raise money across the country...
...from competitive butterflies. He bogeyed 15 but came back with a birdie two on the 186-yd, 16th. His five-iron flew over the yawning trap guarding the flagstick and landed as slftly as a sparrow. He sewed up his 77, known as a Red Grange on the pro tour, by hitting another five iron onto the back of the heart-shaped 18th green...