By Martin Bernheimer [Financial Times 8 February 2010]
If all had gone as originally planned, the offering at the Met on Thursday would have been Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But, facing economic exigencies, Peter Gelb decided to put on Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. It may not be a sure-fire box office attraction, but it apparently costs less to restage and certainly seems less forbidding to conservative New Yorkers.