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Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium to conduct Strauss’s one-act tragedy, transmitted live from the Metropolitan Opera stage to cinemas worldwide. Leading the company’s first new production of the work in 20 years, Claus Guth, one of Europe’s leading opera directors, gives the biblical story a psychologically perceptive Victorian-era setting.
South African soprano Elza van den Heever leads a celebrated cast as the abused and unhinged antiheroine, with Swedish baritone Peter Mattei as the imprisoned prophet Jochanaan, German tenor Gerhard Siegel as Salome’s lecherous stepfather, King Herod, American mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung as his wife, Herodias, and Polish tenor Piotr Buszewski as Narraboth.
From the opening measure, Strauss’s score announces itself as exotic and thoroughly compelling, with much of the work’s magic coming from the orchestra pit. For all the wonder in the orchestra, the opera is uniquely demanding on the singers, particularly the title role, which stands as one of the most challenging – and exhilarating – in the repertoire.
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