Met Opera's Pit Exposed; Luciano's Costumes Deflated UPDATED

I think the time that the Metropolitan Opera's music director, James Levine is spending at his other job (leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra) is beginning to take a toll on orchestral discipline and choral excellence in New York.

On Saturday night, I attended the luxuriously cast performance of "La Traviata" (an opera I haven't seen in at least a decade, because I tend to avoid the warhorses). I always sit in the side boxes, putting me almost right above the orchestra pit, where I witnessed something this time that I've never seen before: A horn player, with little to do for much of the third act, passed the time by flipping through a magazine on her music stand, and then placed it on a shelf beneath the stand of a absent colleague, so she could flip through yet another publication on her stand. (I believe the reader was a woman, but I only saw her from behind.)

From where I was sitting, I could actually hear those pages rustling while Renée Fleming was singing the dying Violetta's heart out. When the reader's missing colleague showed up later to take his part in the final pages of the score, he first picked up the magazine that had been put beneath his stand, donned his eyeglasses, and proceeded to read it until it was his moment to pick up his horn. I tried to determine through my binoculars what so engrossed these inattentive musicians, but couldn't quite make it out.

As you can tell from this detailed account, the low drama in the pit distracted me from the high drama onstage and from Fleming's luscious singing. She seemed to have used the first act to warm up, though, singing a bit tentatively and completely ducking the ringing high note that should triumphantly crown her famous "Sempre libera" aria, bringing down the the house and the curtain. It was a bit like watching an ice skater who was planning to dazzle with a triple axel, but doubled instead.

I assume she didn't opt for the easier note at the first performance. Bernard Holland wrote this in his NY Times review:

In the fireworks of Act I the high notes are there, though a little thinned by the pressure.

I guess by this performance, the pressure was too much.

The chorus also fell short, lacking some of the clarity, brilliance and precision under conductor Marco Armiliato that I have taken for granted in the glorious but now waning Levine era.

Still, the generally thrilling singing and acting by Fleming, Dwayne Croft and Matthew Polenzani swept away these quibbles, as did the poignant display on the Dress Circle level of a rack of Luciano Pavarotti's costumes, labeled inside the collars with his name and the opera:

"La Fille du Régiment"

Written on This Label: "Otello" and "Mr. Pavarotti"

UPDATE: The Opera Chic blogger informs me that she's seen multitasking in the Met pit before. (Maybe I've usually kept my attention onstage, where it belongs.) Opera Chic informs me:

I believe it's been tolerated for a while (at least for the past 5 years since I've been going to the Met), but it's something you don't see very often. At La Scala, they'd chop off your fingers if you did it.