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The Metropolitan Opera’s 2024–25 Live in HD season comes to a close with a live transmission of Rossini’s effervescent comedy. Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina headlines a winning ensemble as the feisty heroine, Rosina, alongside American tenor Jack Swanson, in his Met debut, as her secret beloved, Count Almaviva.
Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky stars as Figaro, the ingenious barber of Seville, with Hungarian bass-baritone Peter Kálmán as Dr. Bartolo and Russian bass Alexander Vinogradov as Don Basilio rounding out the principal cast. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts Bartlett Sher’s madcap production.
Regarded as perhaps the greatest comedy in all of opera, Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia features solos of astounding speed in tongue-twisting patter forms, especially the title role’s well-known Act I showstopper, “Largo al factotum.”
The Met: Live in HD is the Metropolitan Opera’s Peabody and Emmy Award–winning series of opera performances transmitted live from the stage of the Met in New York into movie theaters and event spaces worldwide. The series has made the Met the world’s leading provider of alternative cinema content and the only arts institution with an ongoing global series of this scale. When the series launched in 2006, the Met was the first arts company to experiment with alternative cinema content. Since then, the program has expanded, with more than 31 million tickets sold to date, and has been seen in virtually every important world capital from Paris to Cairo, as well as in towns and villages spread across six continents.
Part of the Stage on Screen Series, sponsored by Dr. James and Marcia Merrins, Live at the Met is underwritten with support from Daniel S. Kaufman and Timothy W. Beaver