Met-A-Mora Revival 1856 - Articles Page 1.8

The Metropolitan Opera, Decca Classics, and Deutsche Grammophon present A Concert for Ukraine, an album recorded live at the Met on March 14, 2022, that features the company’s complete special concert expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

Anthony Roth Costanzo is an opera superstar who brings his otherworldly talent to the title role of AKHNATEN at the Met Opera (which opens tonight and runs through June 10). But along with his celebrated gifts as a countertenor and actor, Anthony is being increasingly recognized by major institutions at home and abroad as a preternaturally gifted producer, arts innovator, community builder, civic leader, and negotiator of change.

Well, no one can say that the Met doesn’t have guts. After the tepid response that subscribers gave its Las Vegas version of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO by Michael Mayer, no one would have suspected that they’d come up with a version of Donizetti’s LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR that made anything else it’s produced look tame. And while the new LUCIA isn’t something that will send every Met attendee into quivers of excitement--I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many pros and cons discussed at an intermission before--it also won’t send them to sleep either.

Richard Strauss’s ELEKTRA is simply overwhelming--particularly when you have Nina Stemme and, especially, Lise Davidsen, as the title character and her sister Chrysothemis, ably abetted by Greer Grimsley as their brother, Orest, and an incredible supporting cast top to bottom.

Ailyn Pérez has excited Met audiences in several of opera’s benchmark soprano roles, and she adds another one this season as Tatiana, the naïve young girl who grows into a sophisticated beauty in Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous opera of unrequited love.

The Metropolitan Opera announced today A Concert for Ukraine on Monday, March 14, at 6:00pm ET, with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Met Orchestra and Chorus, featuring a roster of star soloists.

Soprano Nina Stemme brought down the house when she headlined the premiere of visionary director Patrice Chéreau’s 2016 staging of Elektra. Now she returns to Strauss’s unhinged heroine, opposite one of today’s most in-demand artists, soprano Lise Davidsen, as her sister, Chrysothemis. Donald Runnicles is on the podium for one of opera’s most blistering scores, leading a cast that also includes mezzo-soprano Michaela Schuster as Klytämnestra, tenor Stefan Vinke as Aegisth, and bass-baritone Greer Grimsley as Orest.

Soprano Eleonora Buratto takes on the touchstone title role of the tragic geisha, following earlier Met successes as Norina in Don Pasquale and Liù in Turandot. Tenor Brian Jagde is the callous American naval officer who betrays her, alongside mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong as her devoted maid Suzuki and baritone David Bizic as the consul Sharpless. Alexander Soddy conducts Anthony Minghella’s evocative, ever-popular staging.

Get a first look at a scene from Act III from the Live in HD broadcast, with choreography by Camille A. Brown.

Puccini's thrilling masterpiece Tosca returns to the Metropolitan Opera for 15 performances December 2, 2021-March 12, 2022. Check out video from the final dress rehearsal!

Get a first look at The Met's production of Rigoletto, now on stage through June 11th.

What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou for the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, without sacrificing its impact. It has a gorgeous score, but for a grand opera, it is also quite intimate, with the action mainly revolving around three characters who carry their emotions on their sleeves and interact like their lives depend on it.

Puccini's thrilling masterpiece Tosca returns to the Metropolitan Opera for 15 performances December 2, 2021-March 12, 2022. Check out video from the final dress rehearsal!

Puccini’s Tosca will return to The Metropolitan opera in David McVicar’s thrilling production December 2–March 12. 2021–22 season.

There are so many things to like about the season’s revival of Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS, which was new in the 2019-2020 season, before Covid became the “song” that no one wanted to hear. PORGY on the other hand, is the music that everybody can take a liking to, with its fluid combination of opera, Broadway musical and versions of spirituals and Gullah folk music that nobody ever heard before. It has been best known for its songs, which have become “standards” in the Broadway songbook. The stylistic shifts in the complex, yearning, comic score are handled mightily by the Met’s game orchestra under David Robinson.

The loss of a much loved, respected musical icon, no matter at what age, is always a sad event.

Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones - the first opera by a Black composer ever performed by the Met is now on stage. Get a first look at video from the production!

Don’t miss bass René Pape in Stephen Wadsworth’s landmark production of Mussorgsky’s masterpiece, on stage through October 17 and live in cinemas on October 9. Sebastian Weigle conducts.

America's Next Top Model winner Naima Mora will star in the World Premiere of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF A WOMAN IN NEED. This new play is written by Naima Mora and Marishka S. Phillips and directed by Marishka S. Phillips.

Naima Mora, winner of America's Next Top Model, will star in the off-Broadway production of The Amazing Adventures of a Woman in Need.

A new collective bargaining agreement between the Metropolitan Opera and its orchestra, the last of the Met’s three largest unions to reach an agreement, was ratified today. To commemorate the occasion, the Met has announced two free, pre-season performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” to take place in Damrosch Park on 9/4 and 9/5.

Watch as Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts members of the Met Orchestra and Chorus in the 'Lacrimosa' from Mozart's Requiem and Angel Blue sings Desdemona's 'Ave Maria' from Verdi's Otello as part of A Concert for New York at the Knockdown Center in Queens.

Tomorrow, May 18, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host a virtual, three-day, live convening during which scholars, artists, writers, performers, and activists including Sarah Lewis, (Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University); artist Elizabeth Colomba; Samir Meghelli (Senior Curator at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum); Anupam Sah (Head of Art Conservation, Research, Training at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya); and artist Alexis Peskin will discuss recent shifts in how museums engage and interact with their publics in response to the ongoing pandemic and international calls for social and racial justice.  

Watch below as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Justin Austin, and members of the Met Orchestra perform an excerpt from Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones as part of A Concert for New York at the Knockdown Center in Queens. May 16, 2021.

The Valley Villagers Virtual Choir, headed up by musical director Jeff Rizzo and producer/director Eric Andrist, have gathered together 70+ performers for their latest virtual choir video.