William Kentridge Makes Met Debut Directing Shostakovich’s THE NOSE

Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose has its Metropolitan Opera premiere on March 5 at 8:00 pm, conducted by Valery Gergiev, in a visually arresting new production by artist William Kentridge that features original collage, film, sculpture, and massive projections of the artist's drawings and prints. Making his Met debut, baritone Paulo Szot performs the role of Kovalyov in the story of the Russian official who wakes one morning to discover his nose has disappeared (and taken on a higher bureaucratic rank). Based on the short story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, the opera is what Kentridge has called an exploration of "learning from the absurd." In this production, visuals include renderings of Soviet workers, snatches of newspaper, and projections of propaganda - as well as the missing appendage in adventures ranging from delivering a speech to riding a horse.

The full creative team is making its Met debut. Set design, which features huge collages and tilted walkways, is by William Kentridge in collaboration with Sabine Theunissen. Luc de Wit is the associate director, Greta Goiris creates the costumes, and Urs Schönebaum designs the lighting. Performances of The Nose run through March 25. The cast also features Andrei Popov as the menacing Police Inspector, and Gordon Gietz in the role of the rogue Nose. Pavel Smelkov conducts the final performance.

"I always wanted to do something related to Russia in the 1920s, during the revolutionary period and its aftermath," Kentridge says, "because of my long interest in the history of modernism and in the convoluted relation of art-making to politics." In his view, the story of The Nose addresses "what constitutes a person-how singular are we and how much are we divided against ourselves. It's also about the terrors of hierarchy-how in the Russian society of the czarist era, you were in abject terror of anyone who was above you and, if you were a higher rank, you had a murderous contempt for anyone below you." Kentridge has previously staged opera for the KunstenFESTIVAL des Arts and the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels.

Coinciding with the Met premiere of The Nose is a major retrospective of the artist's work entitled William Kentridge: Five Themes, on view through May 17 at the Museum of Modern Art. The simultaneous presentation of the opera and the exhibit, together with a presentation of Kentridge's Nose-related art at the Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, marks a significant step in the Met's plan to bridge opera and contemporary visual art. The Gallery Met exhibition, entitled Ad Hoc: Works for The Nose, features a number of charcoal drawings, including one of Shostakovich himself. Also on display is a disintegrating wooden sculpture based on this drawing, as well as Kentridge's original art for the banner that currently hangs on the Met façade. Events around town include a series of lectures and discussions. (A complete listing follows.)

The Nose, the first opera by a 22-year-old Shostakovich, written during the early years of Stalin's Soviet leadership, had its world premiere in 1930 at the Maly Theater in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). Despite careful collaboration among the composer, director Nikolay Smolich, designer Vladimir Dmitriyev, and the conductor Samuil Samosud, the opera was quickly denounced and received only 16 performances. The opera was not performed again in the Soviet Union until 1974, in a production supervised by the composer less than one year before his death. The Met premiere of The Nose is a co-production with the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence and the Opéra National de Lyon, France.

About the Performers
Valery Gergiev made his company debut in 1994, taking the podium for Verdi's Otello. Since then, the maestro has led 18 more works here and served as principal guest conductor from 1998 to 2008. At the Met, Gergiev has particularly focused on the Russian repertory. He has conducted well-known operas such as Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (which Gergiev will conduct in a new production next season) and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, as well as Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He has also introduced Met audiences to Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa, and two Prokofiev powerhouses, War and Peace and The Gambler. Gergiev has also conducted at the Met Verdi's Don Carlo and La Traviata, three Wagner operas, Der Fliegende Hollander, Parsifal, and Die Walküre, and Richard Strauss's Salome. Gergiev is the general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. A recording of The Nose, led by Gergiev, has recently been released on the Mariinsky label.
Baritone Paulo Szot makes his Met debut in The Nose as collegiate assessor Kovalyov, the hapless bureaucrat who wakes to find his nose has disappeared from his face. Szot made his Broadway debut in 2008 as Émile De Becque in Lincoln Center Theater's revival of South Pacific, directed by Bartlett Sher. Szot won the Tony Award for his performance, and was also honored by the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle, and the Theatre World Award. Szot has performed a wide range of opera roles, including Belcore in L'Elisir d'Amore, Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Escamillo in Carmen, Count des Grieux in Le Portrait de Manon, Marcello in La Bohème, and the title role of Eugene Onegin with such companies as the New York City Opera, the Boston Lyric Opera, the Palm Beach Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, the Teatro Liceu in Barcelona, the Théâtre National de Bordeaux, and Opéra Marseille.

Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz, who makes his Met debut as the rogue Nose, opened the Arizona Opera's current season as Ferrando in Così fan tutte, a role he sang in 2004 at the Mostly Mozart Festival. His recent performances include Chevalier de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites at La Scala, Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly with Opera Hamilton, and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni with the Canadian Opera Company. He has also recently been seen in Jen?fa in Madrid and L'Heure Espagnole at the Edinburgh Festival.

Andrei Popov trained at the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers and joined the Mariinsky Opera in 2007. The Russian tenor, who makes his Met debut in the role of the Police Inspector, has performed a wide range of roles with the Mariinsky, including Pang in Turandot, Don Basilio and Don Curzio in Le Nozze di Figaro, Monostasos in Die Zauberflöte, and Mime in both Das Rheingold and Siegfried. Popov has appeared at the Mariinsky Theatre's festival and the Golden Mask Festival in Moscow, performing in the opera May Night under Mikhail Pletnev. He has toured extensively with the Mariinsky, including to London, New York, Washington, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo.

About the Production Team
South African-born artist William Kentridge, whose work combines drawing, animation, filmmaking, and collage, rose to international prominence in 1997 when his art was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, and in the Johannesburg and Havana Biennials. This led to a series of solo exhibitions worldwide. In 1998, Kentridge created his first opera production, a staging of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria presented at the KunstenFESTIVAL des Arts in Brussels. Kentridge has also directed Mozart's The Magic Flute, which premiered at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels in 2005 and was later seen at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Kentridge is the recipient of the 2000 Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the 2003 Goslar Kaiserring Award, and the 2008 Oskar Kokoschka Prize. His recent work includes Telegrams from the Nose, a collaborative performance with composer François Sarhan that is inspired by his work on The Nose. For the 2008 Sydney Biennale, Kentridge created I am not me, the horse is not mine, a solo lecture and performance piece inspired by Gogol, which he has recently been performing in New York.

Sabine Theunissen has previously worked for La Scala as a set assistant on productions of Don Carlo, Don Giovanni, Falstaff, Fedora, and Oberon. From 1995 to 2007 she worked in the technical office of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, serving as set assistant for numerous productions, including, The Turn of the Screw, Otello, La Cenerentola, Tosca, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, La Damnation de Faust, Le Retour d'Ulisse, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Così fan tutte, among others. Since 2007, Theunissen has served as production manager at La Monnaie. Most recently she has designed sets for La Giostra d'Amore, Kentridge's production of The Magic Flute and sets and costumes for La Dispute.

Luc de Wit is the founder of the theater group Pantarei, where he worked as an actor and director from 1984 to 1991. In 1995, de Wit began work as an assistant director in musical theater and opera, and has directed De Hand van Guido for the National Music School of Antwerp, the cabaret Divas in Furore, Mozart's Zaïde for the Covent Garden Festival, Don Giovanni for the Music Hall/I Fiaminghi, and Pas de Cinq for Champs d'Action, among other productions. In 2004, de Wit was the assistant director on a production of The Birds for the Cultural Olympiad in Athens. He has collaborated with William Kentridge since 2005, directing the revivals of Kentridge's productions, including The Magic Flute and Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria.

Greta Goiris has worked extensively as a freelance costume designer for theater and opera, with notable past engagements that include design of the costumes for Rwanda 1994 and Anatheme for the Theatre Festival of Avignon in 2000 and 2005 respectively. Goiris has also designed for La Grande Imprecation, La Mère, Andromaque, Barbier de Seville, and La Mouette for Théâtre National Brussels. For several years she has collaborated with the Dutch director Johan Simmons, first at Zuidelijk Toneel Hollandia (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and on subsequent productions of the Leenane Trilogie, Vrijdag, Richard III, Sentimenti, Het Leven een Droom, Hannibal, Bacchanten, and Oresteia. Goiris designed the costumes for Kentridge's production of The Magic Flute at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, her first collaboration with the artist.

Urs Schönebaum has served as a lighting designer for opera, theater, installations, and performances since 2000. He has created the lighting for productions at the Opera La Monnaie in Brussels, Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Baden Baden, Opera di Roma,Berlin State Opera, Théatre du Chatelet Paris, Opéra Comédie Montpellier and the Lincoln Center Festival, among others. From 2005 until 2008, Schönebaum worked as lighting designer in residence with the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel in Munich where he designed more than 15 productions with various directors.
Guest conductor Pavel Smelkov has served as the artistic director and conductor of the Baltika youth chamber orchestra since 1999. In 2000, Smelkov joined the Mariinsky Theater, where he has conducted Eugene Onegin, Falstaff, and The Nutcracker. In March 2007, Smelkov conducted several Mariinsky Theatre productions that were nominated for Russia's Golden Mask Festival.

Exhibitions and Events
The Met premiere of The Nose has inspired a range of events at the opera house and around the city.

The Metropolitan Opera: The Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met

Gallery Met now features an exhibition of Kentridge's work entitled Ad Hoc: Works for the Nose. The exhibition includes a number of charcoal drawings, including one of Shostakovich himself, and 125 paper-and-wood costume cutouts, among other pieces, all inspired by the artist's production of The Nose. Also on display is the original artwork for The Nose banner, which currently hangs on the Met façade. Gallery Met, a contemporary art space, is located in the Met's south lobby. Admission is free.

The Museum of Modern Art
Kentridge's career retrospective William Kentridge: Five Themes is currently on display through May 17, 2010. The exhibition features more than 100 works in a range of mediums-animated films, drawings, prints, theater models, and books, and follows a chronological progression of the artist's work over the last three decades. On Thursday, March 4, at 7 pm, Kentridge performs his one-man show I am not me, the horse is not mine, inspired by his work on the opera and the Gogol short story of the same name.

The New York Public Library
Learning from the Absurd: A Conversation with William Kentridge.

On Friday, March 12, at 7pm, The New York Public Library's Director of Public Programs Paul Holdengräber hosts William Kentridge in a conversation about Gogol, Shostakovich, and Kentridge's creative process.

Live Broadcasts Around the World
The Nose will be experienced by millions of people around the world this season on the radio and the internet, through distribution platforms the Met has established with various media partners.
The March 5 premiere as well as the March 13, 18 and 23 performances will be broadcast live on the Metropolitan Opera Radio on SIRIUS channel 78 and XM channel 79.
The March 13 matinee will also be broadcast live over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network.
The March 5 premiere will also be streamed live via RealNetworks internet streaming on the Met's website www.metopera.org

About the Met
Under the leadership of General Manager Peter Gelb and Music Director James Levine, the Met has a series of bold initiatives underway that are designed to broaden its audience and revitalize the company's repertory. The Met has made a commitment to presenting modern masterpieces alongside the classic repertory, with highly theatrical productions featuring the greatest opera stars in the world.
The Met's 2009-10 season features eight new productions, four of which are Met premieres. Opening night is a new production of Tosca starring Karita Mattila, conducted by Levine and directed by Luc Bondy. The four Met premieres are: Janá?ek's From the House of the Dead, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and directed by Patrice Chéreau, both in Met debuts; Verdi's Attila starring Ildar Abdrazakov, conducted by Riccardo Muti and directed by Pierre Audi, with set and costume design by Miuccia Prada, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron, all in their Met debuts; Shostakovich's The Nose featuring Paulo Szot, conducted by Valery Gergiev and directed and designed by William Kentridge in his Met debut; and Rossini's Armida with Renée Fleming, conducted by Riccardo Frizza and directed by Mary Zimmerman. Other new productions are Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann starring Joseph Calleja, Anna Netrebko, and Alan Held, conducted by Levine and directed by Bartlett Sher; Carmen with El?na Garan?a and Roberto Alagna, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and directed by Richard Eyre, both in Met debuts; and Thomas's Hamlet with Natalie Dessay and Simon Keenlyside, conducted by Louis Langrée and directed by Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser in their Met debuts.
Building on its 78-year radio broadcast history-currently heard over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network-the Met now uses advanced media distribution platforms and state-of-the-art technology to attract new audiences and reach millions of opera fans around the world.

The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning The Met: Live in HD series returns for its fourth season in 2009-10 with nine transmissions, beginning October 10 with the new production of Tosca and ending with the new production of Rossini's Armida on May 1. The productions are seen in more than 1000 theaters in 44 countries around the world and last season sold more than 1.8 million tickets. These performances began airing on PBS in March 2008, and thirteen HD performances are now available on DVD. The Magic Flute was released by the Met and is available at the newly renovated Met Opera Shop. In addition, two classic Met performances from 1978 have recently been released by the Met: Otello, conducted by Levine with Jon Vickers and Renata Scotto; and Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci conducted by Levine, with Tatiana Troyanos and Plácido Domingo in the first part of the double bill and Teresa Stratas, Plácido Domingo, and Sherrill Milnes in the latter. The Met: Live in HD series is made possible by a generous grant from the Neubauer Family Foundation. Bloomberg L.P. is the global corporate sponsor of The Met: Live in HD.
HD Live in Schools, the Met's program offering free opera transmissions to New York City schools in partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the Metropolitan Opera Guild, continues for a third season. This season, for the second consecutive year the program will reach public school students and teachers in 18 cities and communities nationwide. HD Live in Schools is made possible by Bank of America.

Continuing its innovative use of electronic media to reach a global audience, the Metropolitan Opera last season introduced Met Player, a new subscription service that makes much of the company's extensive video and audio catalog of full-length performances available to the public for the first time online in exceptional, state-of-the-art quality. The new service currently offers nearly 200 historic audio recordings, and almost 100 full-length opera videos are available, including 28 of the company's acclaimed The Met: Live in HD transmissions, known for their extraordinary sound and picture quality. New content, including HD productions and archival broadcasts, are added monthly.

Metropolitan Opera Radio on SIRIUS XM Radio is a subscription-based audio entertainment service broadcasting an unprecedented number of live performances each week throughout the Met's entire season, as well as rare historical performances, newly restored and remastered, spanning the Met's 78-year broadcast history.
In addition to providing audio recordings through the Met on Rhapsody on-demand service, the Met also presents free live audio streaming of performances on its website once every week during the opera season with support from RealNetworks®.

The company's groundbreaking commissioning program in partnership with New York's Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) provides renowned composers and playwrights with the resources to create and develop new works at the Met and at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. The Met's partnership with LCT is part of the company's larger initiative to commission new operas from contemporary composers, present modern masterpieces alongside the classic repertory, and provide a venue for artists to nurture their work. The first work to be produced from this program will be Nico Muhly's debut opera (as yet untitled), set to a libretto by Craig Lucas. A co-production with the English National Opera, the opera will be directed by Bartlett Sher, debuting at the ENO's London Coliseum in June 2011 and at the Met during its 2013-14 season.

The Met audience development initiatives include Open House Dress Rehearsals, which are free and open to the public; the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, which exhibits contemporary visual art; the immensely successful Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Ticket program; and an annual Holiday Presentation for families. This season's special Holiday Presentation is Richard Jones's English-language production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, which is given four matinee performances and four evening performance as a way for families to celebrate the holiday season.

For more information, visit www.metopera.org

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