It also dispensed with the time-honored tradition of hiring big stars for opening night Aleksandrs Antonenko, Zeljko Lucic and the dazzling Sonya Yoncheva are familiar to some regular operagoers, but hardly household names. To save money at this year’s opening, the Met even dispensed with what had become an annual tradition of live-broadcasting the performance onto Lincoln Center Plaza. We know tickets aren’t selling we sense a hint of desperation in the search for cutting-edge stagings, leading to the engagement and reengagement of the Tony-Award-winning Sher, even though none of his five previous productions for the Met has been all that great. Labor disputes and articles about the company’s financial struggles took the last of the bloom off the Peter Gelb rose the executive director who promised big changes when he took over in 2006 is struggling as much as any of his predecessors. The Met has taken its knocks in recent years. On Monday, you were at opening night of the season: Verdi’s “Otello,” staged by Bartlett Sher. When you see a stage crowded with people in generic 19th-century costumes, with a dark, vaguely abstracted set and dramatic white lighting, the year could be 1985 or 2015, but you know you’re at the Met. NEW YORK - There’s a certain timelessness to opera at the Metropolitan Opera.

Met opera schedule april 2015