Anna Netrebko Leads MACBETH, Opening Tonight at The Met

Anna Netrebko sings her first North American performances of the charismatic villainess of Verdi's Macbeth this season, in starry cast that also includes Željko Lu?i? as Macbeth, Joseph Calleja as Macduff, and René Pape as Banquo. Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi will lead all seven performances of the opera, which opens tonight, September 24 in a revival of noted Shakespeare director Adrian Noble's 2007 production. The October 11 matinee performance will launch the ninth season of the Met's Live in HD series when it is transmitted worldwide to more than 2,000 movie theaters in 68 countries around the world.

Anna Netrebko who sang in the Met's opening night performance for the last three years in a row, this season takes on the challenging new role of Verdi's Lady Macbeth. She has previously sung the role in only two performances at the Bavarian State Opera this past summer. The Russian soprano made her Met debut in 2002 as Natasha in the Met premiere of Prokofiev's War and Peace and has since sung 14 more roles including new production premieres of Donizetti's Anna Bolena, Don Pasquale, and L'Elisir d'Amore; Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin; and Massenet's Manon. Netrebko sings the title role in another Met premiere, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, this coming January.

Serbian baritone Željko Lu?i? sang the title role in Macbeth when the current production premiered in 2007. He also sang the new production premiere of Verdi's Rigoletto in 2013, and has performed numerous dramatic baritone roles at the Met including Barnaba in Ponchielli's La Gioconda, Carlo Gérard in Giordano's Andrea Chénier, Germont in Verdi's La Traviata, Count di Luna in Verdi's Il Trovatore, and the title role in Verdi's Nabucco. He adds a new role to his Met repertory when he sings Alfio in the new production of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana later this season.

Following his Met debut as the Duke in Rigoletto in 2006, Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja has appeared regularly with the company in the many of the iconic roles of the lyric tenor repertory: Rodolfo in Puccini's La Bohème, Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore, Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, and the title roles of Gounod's Faust and Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann.

Among the most celebrated basses of today, René Pape has sung a wide variety of roles to great acclaim at the Met. Particularly known for such Wagnerian parts as Gurnemanz in Parsifal, King Marke in Tristan und Isolde, and King Heinrich in Lohengrin, he has also sung Mozart's Leporello in Don Giovanni, Gounod's Méphistophélès in Faust, Philip in Verdi's Don Carlo, and the title role of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Met. This season he sings a solo recital on the Met stage on September 27 and Sarastro in a revival of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi made his Met debut with Verdi's Don Carlo in 2005 and has since led an eclectic repertory of 24 operas as well as five concerts with the MET Orchestra. Among his most notable performances have been Wagner's entire cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, a new production of Richard Strauss's rarely heard Die Ägyptische Helena, Berlioz's epic Les Troyens, and new productions of Un Ballo in Maschera, Don Giovanni (in which he also played the harpsichord for recitatives), and Manon. Maestro Luisi returns this spring to conduct the new production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.

Although Verdi operas have always been a staple of the Met's repertory, the company did not perform Macbeth until 1959, in its 74th season. The Met premiere performances were originally planned to bring Maria Callas's celebrated interpretation of Lady Macbeth to New York for the first time, but after the soprano quarreled with Met management, she was famously fired from the engagement. Instead, Leonie Rysanek made her Met debut in the role, in a cast that also included Leonard Warren, Carlo Bergonzi, and Jerome Hines, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.

Adrian Noble's production is the third staging of Macbeth in Met history. The premiere production was directed by Carl Ebert in his company debut, and Peter Hall directed a new production of the opera in 1982.

The October 11 matinee performance of Macbeth will be transmitted live around the world at 12:55 p.m. ET as part of the Met's Live in HD series. The transmission, hoisted by Anita Rachvelishvili, will be seen in more than 2,000 movie theaters in 68 countries around the world.

The September 24 opening performance will be broadcast live on Metropolitan Opera Radio on SIRIUS XM Channel 74, as will the performances on October 8 and 15. The October 15 performance will also be streamed live on the Met's Web site, www.metopera.org.

On February 7, an archived performance from the fall run will be broadcst over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network.

Pictured: Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth and Željko Lu?i? in the title role of Verdi's Macbeth. Photo by Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera.

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