Catch free screenings of Met Opera performances as part of Summer HD Fest
For ten nights, the Met will project both classics and new works from its Live in HD series onto a screen on the facade of the opera house: Verdi's Aida, Beethoven's Fidelio, Strauss' Salome, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Jeanine Tesori's Grounded, Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas, Puccini's Tosca, Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and Puccini's La Fanciulla del West are all on the lineup.
The series kicks off Friday, August 22, with a special screening of Maestro, the 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan. Directed by Cooper, the movie features plenty of musical moments, including Bernstein's Mass and the Fancy Free ballet reinterpreted by Tony winner Justin Peck.
The rest of the line-up includes highlights from the Met's 2024-2025 season: Michael Mayer's production of Aida, featuring Angel Blue, Judit Kutasi, Piotr Beczala, Quinn Kelsey, and Morris Robinson; Fidelio, with Lise Davidsen, Ying Fang, David Butt Philip, Magnus Dietrich, Tomasz Konieczny and René Pape; Salome, the adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play, starring Elza van den Heever, Michelle DeYoung, Gerhard Siegel and Peter Mattei; and Richard Eyre's production of Le Nozze di Figaro, with a young cast that includes Federica Lombardi, Olga Kulchynska, Sun‑Ly Pierce, Joshua Hopkins and Michael Sumuel.
On Wednesday, August 27, see a screening of Tony winner Jeanine Tesori's opera about drone warfare, Grounded, starring Emily D'Angelo and directed by Michael Mayer. The rest of the series includes Bartlett Sher's productions of Les Contes d'Hoffmann and Il Barbiere di Siviglia; director Mary Zimmerman's take on Florencia en el Amazonas; Lise Davidsen, Freddie De Tommaso, and Quinn KelseyIl in Tosca, and the 2018 production of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, with Eva‑Maria Westbroek, Jonas Kaufmann and Željko Lučić.
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Salome review – a frankly astonishing concert performance
Antonio Pappano never conducted Salome while he was music director at Covent Garden, but he has now turned to Strauss's opera for the final concerts of his opening season with the London Symphony Orchestra, assembling, in the process, one of the finest casts you could ever hope to hear in the work, and presenting us with an interpretation at once decadent, beautiful, engulfing, and frankly little short of astonishing. Gabriel Fauré once dubbed the score a 'symphonic poem with voices added', which is not an entirely accurate description, given the power and psychological insight of Strauss's vocal writing, but does emphasise the centrality of the orchestra's role in carrying the dramatic and emotional intensity. With the LSO on tremendous form, Pappano lets the music unfurl in a single unbroken arc of gathering tension from the slithery, lubricious clarinet solo with which it opens to the savagery of the ending, and every flicker of detail and colour in Strauss's orchestration hits home. Strings sound palpably sensual, woodwind by turns exquisite and edgy, the brass associated with Jochanaan infinitely noble as it intrudes on the prevailing mood of feverish eroticism. The overall effect is of great beauty slowly turning monstrous, obscene, and rotten with decay. It's sung with remarkable and consistent lyricism, avoiding the expressionistic-sprechstimme approach we sometimes find, and all the more powerful for it. The concerts finally allow us to hear Asmik Grigorian in the title role, a career-making assumption when she first sang it in Salzburg in 2018, but which she has not performed in the UK until now. The mixture of metal and silk in her tone allows her to soar comfortably and rapturously above Strauss's orchestra both in her declarations of love to Michael Volle's Jochanaan and in voicing the torrential emotions of the final scene. Elsewhere, the darkness in her lower registers conveys nerve-ridden ennui, steely determination and imperious selfishness. She is utterly compelling throughout. Volle, meanwhile, superbly captures the fanaticism that lurks behind Jochanaan's principled dignity, is magnificent in his evocation of Christ preaching to his disciples on Lake Galilee, and ferocious as he heaps curses on Salome. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke makes a suitably neurotic Herod: vapid, weak-willed, lethally dangerous, barely maintaining the veneer of elegance he tries to preserve before his dinner guests. His Herodias is Violeta Urmana, fierce in her scorn and well nigh brutal in her irony. John Findon sounds ardent, even heroic as Narraboth, his voice bigger than many we usually hear in the role, while Niamh O'Sullivan is eloquent and deeply touching as the Page. An outstanding, overpowering achievement, every second of it, and one of the greatest performances of Salome I've ever heard. At the Barbican, London, on 13 July
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Telegraph
Salome, LSO: This take on Wilde is truly sensational
Great operas in concert have now become a regular feature of the LSO's seasons at the Barbican, but none can have made quite as much noise as this searing performance of Richard Strauss's Salome under conductor Antonio Pappano. The overwhelming sonorities of Strauss's score, so outrageous when they were first performed in 1905 – and still terrifying today – pulverised us into submission. At times it seemed that all the voices could do was surf along on the top of this torrential instrumental sound, only sometimes coming up for air. But at the crucial moments they cut through, thanks to a world-class cast. The grisly story derives from Oscar Wilde's one-act play, which Strauss saw in 1902: Salome, the stepdaughter of Herod, forms a sensual obsession with Jochanaan (John the Baptist) and asks Herod, who is in thrall to her, to receive his head on a silver platter. The holy Jochanaan has rejected her in life; now she only wants to kiss his lips in death. There's something compelling about not having any staging – no Dance of the Seven Veils for Salome; no black cistern in which Jochanaan lurks (unless you count the Barbican's backstage, from which he sang); no head of Jochanaan for Salome to embrace. It enabled our imaginations to roam freely. Pappano conducted Strauss's Elektra as his final, new production at Covent Garden, and so Salome was perhaps a natural choice for an opera at the end of his first season with the LSO. He also had support from the Royal Opera's director of casting, Peter Katona, who ensured an experienced, A-list lineup: some used scores, others had no need in shorter roles they knew well. As Salome, Asmik Grigorian was phenomenal, capturing perfectly the role's dissonance between girlish charm and brutal eroticism; her voice mixed purity with power in a way that demolished any idea that wayward vibrato is necessary to express passion, and her E-major arpeggio as she asked for Jokanaan's head chilled the blood. Matching her in defiance, but with a stentorian command that overrode the orchestra, Michael Volle's Jochanaan tremendously portrayed religious fanaticism. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke struggled to make the fussy, manic writing for Herod register, but Violetta Urmana as his wife Herodias soared in support of her daughter. John Findon as Narraboth and Niamh O'Sullivan as the Page were both sharp-edged and clear, while the two fluent Nazarenes and ensemble of five Jews crowded onto the already teemingly full stage, struggling to make their presence felt. Pappano had one basic decision to make in this performance: whether to suppress the orchestra as if they were buried in a theatre pit, or to unleash them with their full sonic potential on the open stage. He chose the latter, accepting all the issues of balance that created, but delved deep into the score, in control of every detail; and the result was both astonishingly accurate and emotionally draining.
Time Out
3 days ago
- Time Out
Catch free screenings of Met Opera performances as part of Summer HD Fest
Opera fiends rejoice! The Metropolitan Opera announced the return of its beloved Summer HD Festival to Lincoln Center Plaza this summer, with free nightly screenings from Friday, August 22 to Monday, September 1. For ten nights, the Met will project both classics and new works from its Live in HD series onto a screen on the facade of the opera house: Verdi's Aida, Beethoven's Fidelio, Strauss' Salome, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Jeanine Tesori's Grounded, Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas, Puccini's Tosca, Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, and Puccini's La Fanciulla del West are all on the lineup. The series kicks off Friday, August 22, with a special screening of Maestro, the 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan. Directed by Cooper, the movie features plenty of musical moments, including Bernstein's Mass and the Fancy Free ballet reinterpreted by Tony winner Justin Peck. The rest of the line-up includes highlights from the Met's 2024-2025 season: Michael Mayer's production of Aida, featuring Angel Blue, Judit Kutasi, Piotr Beczala, Quinn Kelsey, and Morris Robinson; Fidelio, with Lise Davidsen, Ying Fang, David Butt Philip, Magnus Dietrich, Tomasz Konieczny and René Pape; Salome, the adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play, starring Elza van den Heever, Michelle DeYoung, Gerhard Siegel and Peter Mattei; and Richard Eyre's production of Le Nozze di Figaro, with a young cast that includes Federica Lombardi, Olga Kulchynska, Sun‑Ly Pierce, Joshua Hopkins and Michael Sumuel. On Wednesday, August 27, see a screening of Tony winner Jeanine Tesori's opera about drone warfare, Grounded, starring Emily D'Angelo and directed by Michael Mayer. The rest of the series includes Bartlett Sher's productions of Les Contes d'Hoffmann and Il Barbiere di Siviglia; director Mary Zimmerman's take on Florencia en el Amazonas; Lise Davidsen, Freddie De Tommaso, and Quinn KelseyIl in Tosca, and the 2018 production of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, with Eva‑Maria Westbroek, Jonas Kaufmann and Željko Lučić.
