It costs a lot of money to look this cheap: Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala reviewed

Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the crisis the way it knows best — by assembling the most glamorous possible list of vocal megastars and presenting them at astronomical expense. But dollars can’t get around social distancing, and in lockdown even the greatest voice is only as good as the mic on a smartphone. Cue four hours of free-to-view party pieces from 43 of the world’s greatest singers, broadcast live from their homes without orchestra, without editing and without excuses.

So the credits rolled with all the bombast familiar from the Met’s cinema relays, and it was over to Peter Mattei, live from his summer house in the Stockholm archipelago, singing Don Giovanni’s serenade with the camera jammed at a wonky angle and what looked like a dog (but might have been a cushion) snoozing on the floor behind him. The format, unsurprisingly, had the air of Eurovision — ‘And now, over to René Pape in Berlin.’ Between segments, the Met’s wraith-like general manager Peter Gelb acted as anchor, and for a man with the screen presence of Voldemort, he did okay.

It was endearingly low-res, though it felt at times that what Gelb called the ‘gods of the internet’ were taking a malicious pleasure in cutting the sound for a second just as a singer was phrasing off a pianissimo ending. For all the technical prowess involved in switching from Manhattan to Moscow to Tbilisi to Paris, the words of another great singer came to mind: it costs a lot of money to look this cheap. But there’s no arguing with the Met’s address book. Renée Fleming, Joseph Calleja, Sonya Yoncheva, Piotr Beczala and Elina Garanca all took their turn, some singing to tinny pre-recorded backing tracks, others accompanied by a tame domestic pianist.