Scoring cash for opera matter of Met-amorphosis

New York's famous opera house is incredibly well endowed, yet money can't buy what modern audiences are beginning to demand, writes HEATH LEES.

Comfortably resting on its underground springs - of metal, not water - New York's Metropolitan Opera House rises in pseudo-classical splendour, impervious to the cacophony outside where Broadway merges with Columbus Ave and the 66th St subway flushes rivers of pedestrians into seas of traffic.

Inside the opera house known as the Met, the air-conditioned silence, huge chandeliers, red plush carpets and the complete disdain for signs telling ordinary mortals how to find seats, all seem to breathe money. Two huge Chagall paintings stretch from ceiling to floor. The Met, you feel, must be the richest opera house in the world.

Suitably impressed, you are ushered in to meet the person in charge of the artistic side of this splendour, Sarah Billinghurst, who comes from just outside Wanganui.

Twenty years ago, with no more than a liking for classical music, she settled in San Francisco and joined the opera staff as a volunteer helper.

The career rise that followed was meteoric and Billinghurst found herself running the company, very successfully, for 16 years. But in 1994 the New York "Met Mafia" came headhunting with an offer she couldn't refuse, and now she stands second only to Met director Joseph Volpe.

"When Placido Domingo and conductor James Levine are not talking to each other, they talk to me," she says. "That's the way it works and I have to make things move ahead."

The "things" she mentions constitute an operatic juggernaut. The Met does a staggering seven opera performances a week, including matinees, for 37 weeks of the year. Out of season there are open-air performances, gala occasions, and symphony concerts in which the superb Metropolitan Opera Orchestra gives hugely popular programmes.

The annual budget is $US174 million ($378 million). Of that, $70 million comes from private and corporate sponsorship. "Of course, the tax breaks in this country make it more attractive for companies to do their bit," Billinghurst says with calculated American understatement, "but the cost of the whole operation means that we're forever asking for money. We get quite good at it."

In the Met's tasteful horizon of "planned giving" everyone wins a name to fit the gift. Regular donors of $250,000 are allowed into the Gold Circle, and the $15,000-upwards givers, called Benefactors, can admire their names in the programme. At the bottom of the list, those who give less than $3000 are lumped together with a brief mention.

In the foyer the cash registers of the huge souvenir shop beep non-stop, marking the financial passage of Met-produced videos, Met-recorded CDs, Met-designed T-shirts and even Met-shaped keyrings. When I suggest to Billinghurst that hers is the most commercial opera house in the world, she takes it as a compliment.

"The reality is that we do have to be fiercely commercial," she says, "but just look at the scale of our operations and the quality of what we do."

She has a point. Down in the bowels of the building it's more like a city than an opera company. Pushing your way past hundreds of expensive costumes stacked in every corridor, you move through welding shops, carpentry bays and electrical sections.

There are seven huge elevators within the stage floor and two stage crews of 50 alternating night and day. Everything is done in air-conditioned self-sufficiency. The only windows that open are in the major stars' dressing rooms. After all, at $13,000 a performance they can't have their expensive throats drying up in artificial air.

The guide who takes us on this amazing multi-storeyed tour is Elliot Rosenberg, an easy, cultured New Yorker who loves his opera house. We tell him informatively that New Zealand is close to Australia. He replies that he has a house in Whakatane. New York is a strange place.

At the end of it all, what's the product like? How do the Met operas rate against the world's other major opera houses?

Not very well, some say. Too much reliance on private funds from established sources means that only the established taste rules, inevitably conservative, with little room for experimental or innovative direction.

Certainly, in a Wagner Ring cycle you feel you are stepping back into history-book production, where sets and costumes of the most naturalistic kind form a backdrop for predictable lighting changes and unremarkable stage movement.

Whatever else, though, the musical effect is rarely less than fabulous, as listeners in New Zealand may know, since Concert FM broadcast Wagner's Ring from the Met in May.

Beautiful singing combines with marvellous playing for a standard that is probably better than anywhere else in the world. It's the top quality that money can buy.

But even at the Met things are changing. The conservative millionaire sponsors are dying off and younger corporate money is coming in, wanting a more modern type of theatre. A few recent operas have spurned all the cliffs, caves, coastlines and countrysides that look so imposing from the Met's 4000-seat auditorium and gone for subtle lighting, symbolic action and starker sets.

Singers at the Met now have to act as well as sing, and instead of the constant revivals of old productions there's talk of new interpretations, and even, heaven help us, new operas.

No one is taking bets on whether the Met can leap out of what has become a financial prison and make a name for itself in the world of music theatre.

With all its riches and its vast scale of operation, the Met is a magnificent cultural monument and an unparalleled arts marketing venture, but its artistic passage into the 21st century is proving slow and painful.