chris said:
The Metropolitan Opera has the best seats available for Monday-Thursday performances at $20. You have to go a few hours before and queue. A gift from benefactors. If you are patient, you can get a seat at last minute at a fabulous price -- ORCHESTRA seats!
That's right - if you show up at the Met around 4 PM and wait until 6, you can sometimes get one of 200 rush tickets to the Met that normally sell for U$ 150-350 - considerably more than ticket prices at the Teatro Colón. The Met's rush seats are paid for by a U$ 21 million gift by the late Agnes Varis, who founded a generic-drug company in the US.
Note that U$ 21 million is more than 15% of the annual budget of the Colón for last season. As in Europe, Argentina has neither the tradition of cultural philanthropy nor the tax incentives to promote it.
By contrast, the Met's annual budget is U$ 325 million, which doesn't include a serious ballet company, a dedicated concert orchestra, or the training conservatory that, for better or worse, are the most important of their respective endeavors in this country, or arguably on this continent. To compare apples to apples, New York to Buenos Aires, it would be more realistic to roll in the budgets of either American Ballet Theater (U$ 25 million) or New York City Ballet (U$ 60 million), plus the New York Philharmonic (U$ 69 million), and Julliard (U$ 70), and a big chunk of the Lincoln Center operating budget as well.
Such comparisons are useless, of course. The Colón doesn't play in the same league and lacks the facilities to even attempt the breadth of activities presented by these companies in aggregate. That said, the Colón's opera and orchestral performances are generally strong, usually at least comparable those of B-companies in Europe (which operate with comparable budgets).
Should the same budget produce better performances? Or comparable performances with cheaper tickets? Or course! At least in a perfect world. But if you regularly attend the Met, you'll hear a lot of ratty performances far more disappointing than the Colon's recent offerings. (On my last visit visit, I saw an Aida who didn't even attempt to sing the Nile scene. . . .)
The real attraction for me is to hear live music in this magnificent theater, with the clearest acoustic I've encountered in any large opera house or concert hall.
chris said:
The Colon Ballet is mediocre. It can't be compared to leading groups in the US or Europe. The prices are way too high for Argentina and can not be put on an international level. You couldn't charge that much in the US for the quality they deliver (the Colon Opera is the strongest performing arts group in BA). By the way, Argentina has produced several first rate dancers but they have gone to the American Ballet Theatre or to Europe.
I agree that most Colón performances are not at the level of the top international companies, and that the ballet is probably the weakest of the opera/concert/ballet triad. But they don't charge Covent Garden prices, either.
It is a fact that many great Argentine performers - whether dancers, singers, pianists, or other instrumentalists - have gone elsewhere to realize their careers. Given the choice of working at home for the second-rate fees that the Colón can afford, or being celebrated in European and North American capitals, what would you do?
Sponsors like the Mozarteum Argentino go out of their way to create opportunities for Argentine performers like Daniel Barenboim or Nelson Goerner to return and perform here. Since they need to recover almost all their costs from ticket sales, these performances are
really expensive!
==============
I'll put in a plug for the Teatro Argentino in La Plata, which is the little company that tries really hard. Performances at the Colón may sometimes have a little more polish, but the Argentino's are generally more exciting. The young Argentine conductor Alejo Pérez is doing really ambitious work as music director there.
In the company's 120-year history, they had never performed a full opera of Wagner until last season's Tristan, and this season they began mounting a Ring cycle. The opening Rheingold had all Argentine singers, who gave a lovely, lyrical performance the likes of which you're unlikely to ever hear at the Colón. Or at the Met, for that matter. And tickets are cheap, even including the cost of getting to La Plata.
