2009-10 Live in HD Season
The Metropolitan Opera’s Peabody and Emmy Award-winning series The Met: Live in HD continues for its fourth season, featuring nine live transmissions. All live performances begin at Noon. Don’t miss the chance to experience the Met live at your local movie theater!
LIVE: March 27, 2010 (Noon)
ENCORE: March 28, 2010 (1:00 p.m.)
The works of Shakespeare have inspired more operatic adaptations than any other writer’s. Simon Keenlyside and Marlis Petersen bring their extraordinary acting and singing skills to two of the Bard’s most unforgettable characters in this new production of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. For the role of Ophelia, the French composer created an extended mad scene that is among the greatest in opera.
Conductor: Louis Langrée; Production: Patrice Caurier/Moshe Leiser; Marlis Petersen, Jennifer Larmore, Toby Spence, Simon Keenlyside, James Morris
Approximate running time 3 hours 45 minutes / 1 intermission
Please Note: Marlis Petersen will sing the role of Ophélie in the first six performances (including the Met HD broadcast) of the Met’s new production of Thomas’s Hamlet, replacing Natalie Dessay who is ill. The German soprano made her company debut as Adele in Die Fledermaus in 2005. She recently created the title role in the world premiere of Aribert Reimann’s Medea at the Vienna State Opera, a performance that brought her enormous acclaim.
LIVE: May 1, 2010 (Noon)
LIVE: May 2, 2010 (1:00 p.m.)
This mythical story of a sorceress who enthralls men in her island prison has inspired operatic settings by a multitude of composers, including Gluck, Haydn, and Dvorˇák. Renée Fleming stars in the title role of Rossini’s version, opposite no fewer than six tenors. Tony Award winner Mary Zimmerman returns to direct this new production of a work she describes as “a buried treasure, a box of jewels.” The fanciful and magical tale, Zimmerman says, “has an epic, enchanted quality and a tremendous visual element.”
Conductor: Riccardo Frizza; Production: Mary Zimmerman; Renée Fleming, Lawrence Brownlee, Bruce Ford, José Manuel Zapata, Barry Banks, Kobie van Rensburg
Approximate running time 4 hours 20 minutes / 2 intermissions