Temporary Met Box Office Entrance
August 6, 2008
Lincoln Center is under construction, but you can still make it to the Met box office! When tickets go on sale later this month, the entrance to the box office will be temporarily relocated. During this time, prior to the opening of the 2008–09 season, direct access from Josie Robertson Plaza through the front lobby of the opera house is not available. To avoid delays and long waiting times, we encourage all patrons to buy their tickets online or by phone.
If you choose to buy your tickets in person at the box office, please enter the building through Founders Hall on the Concourse level, located one level below street level, directly under the main lobby. To get to Founders Hall, use one of the following entrances:
1 – On West 62nd Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, through the underpass/garage
2 – On West 65th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, through the underpass by the Vivian Beaumont Theater stage door
3 – From Columbus Avenue, via the lobby of Avery Fisher Hall
Single tickets for the Met's 125th anniversary season go on sale to subscribers and Met Members on Monday, August 11, at 10 A.M., and to the general public on Sunday, August 17, at 12 P.M.
Plácido Domingo's 40th Anniversary Celebration
July 30, 2008
Event Information | Photo Gallery | Audio Highlights
On September 28, 1968, Plácido Domingo made his Met debut as Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur opposite Renata Tebaldi. Hailed at the time by the New York Times as "the Metropolitan's hottest young artist," he went on to become one of the company's most beloved singers, opening the Met season a record 21 times. On Sunday, September 28, exactly 40 years to the day after his memorable first appearance, Domingo will be honored with a gala dinner on the Met stage. General Manager Peter Gelb, Music Director James Levine, and a number of top Met stars, as well as winners of Domingo's Operalia competition, will pay tribute to the legendary tenor in this unforgettable celebration.
For tickets (beginning at $1,500), please call the Met's Box Office at 212-362-6000.
Francesco Clemente on Charlie Rose Tonight
July 25, 2008
Renowned painter Francesco Clemente, who recently created a series of portraits of Met divas for an exhibit in Gallery Met, will be a guest on Charlie Rose tonight. Clemente's exhibition, The Sopranos, features paintings of Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, and Deborah Voigt, who will all appear at the Met next season. Currently closed due to Lincoln Center construction, the gallery and The Sopranos will reopen September 16, 2008.
Fifty Thousand Attend Met Summer Concert
June 23, 2008
A record crowd turned out for the first-ever Met Summer Concert on Friday night. About 50,000 people descended on Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for the one-night-only event starring Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna. According to New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, attendance was nearly two and a half times greater than the previous record for a live event in the park.
The audience wasn’t just big; it also ran the demographic gamut, with school kids sitting shoulder to shoulder with hardcore opera fans. For many, it was their first experience of opera. (Overheard entering the Long Meadow: “Someone said, ‘Opera,’ and we were like, Okay, I guess we could try it. It’s cool.”)
Gheorghiu and Alagna sang a program of mostly familiar favorites: the soprano’s “Un bel dì” from Madama Butterfly and the tenor’s “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca were notable high points of the second half of the performance. By the time the duo got to the encores, there was rhythmic clapping and cheering from the crowd, particularly for Alagna’s “Nessun dorma” from Turandot and for a verse of “O sole mio” sung in English by Gheorghiu. A Romanian contingent erupted at the start of “Te iubesc” from Lăsaţi-mă Să Cânt, an operetta by Romanian composer Gherase Dendrino. And “Granada” was such a hit, the couple sang it twice.
Apart from a helicopter buzzing overhead during the first few numbers and a phalanx of bats that swooped and dived over the crowd at dusk, it was an ideal night for outdoor music-making.
The concert was streamed live on the Met website and heard on WQXR, with Met radio announcer Margaret Juntwait as host.
Photo: Cory Weaver/Metropolitan Opera
Gheorghiu and Alagna – Live and on Canvas
June 16, 2008
Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna were at the opera house today doing interviews to promote Friday night’s Met Summer Concert. Before they returned to their suite in Mandarin Oriental, they made a quick detour into Gallery Met to check out The Sopranos, Francesco Clemente’s new solo exhibition for which Gheorghiu posed as Magda, her character in next season’s new production of La Rondine.
“It’s fantastic!” Gheorghiu said of the painting.
“It’s the best one!” her proud husband Alagna asserted.
The duo was followed by a French television crew, which was able to catch Gheorghiu studying Gheorghiu on camera.
The new production of La Rondine opens in a special gala performance on New Year’s Eve. And you can catch the Alagna’s live in Prospect Park on Friday night at 8pm.
Photo: Elena Park/Metropolitan Opera
New Survey Highlights Influence of The Met: Live in HD
June 12, 2008
A survey conducted by Opera America, the national service organization for opera, shows that the Met's live high-definition transmissions are attracting new audiences for opera. Live in HD attendees in 34 cities around the country were given surveys at the spring transmissions of Peter Grimes and La Bohème. Of all the people surveyed, more than 92% said they planned to see a live opera, either at the Met or another opera house. A number of these respondents say they have never before attended a live opera performance, though they are likely to after the HD experience. Almost one in five HD audience members had not attended a live performance in the past two years and more than 5 percent of those surveyed have never been to a live opera performance at all.
"The results of this new survey show that our high-definition transmissions are accomplishing what we had hoped: generating broader interest in opera," said Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb. Marc Scorca, the president and CEO of Opera America, added, "The fact that so many people are being introduced to opera through this initiative shows its tremendous value to the entire field."
The Live in HD series attracted an audience of more than 920,000 people during the 2007–08 season. The series will expand next season to feature 11 HD presentations, starting with the Opening Night Gala starring Renée Fleming (shown in North America only) and spanning the entire season.
Final Carnegie Hall Concert of the Season
May 21, 2008
The Met opera season has ended, but James Levine and the MET Orchestra will join forces one more time for the season's final Carnegie Hall concert tomorrow. The program combines Schumann's beloved piano concerto, featuring the young American pianist Jonathan Biss, with Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and the Variations for Orchestra by Elliott Carter, one of today's leading American composers who celebrates his 100th birthday this year.
For tickets and more information, visit www.carnegiehall.org.
James Levine Celebrates Elliott Carter at 100
May 15, 2008
Met Music Director James Levine will celebrate composer Elliott Carter's 100th birthday at a special presentation at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday, May 21, at 6.30 P.M. The evening features the world-premiere screening of a filmed performance of Carter's only opera, What Next?, presented by the Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, conducted by Maestro Levine. Following the screening, Carter and Levine will be joined onstage by director/designer Doug Fitch and former Boston Globe chief music critic Richard Dyer for a discussion of the work.
Carter, born in 1908 in New York City and widely regarded as one of America's greatest living composers, wrote What Next? on a commission from the Berlin State Opera, where it received its world premiere in a concert performance in 1999. The 40-minute opera, with a libretto by Paul Griffiths, was inspired by a scene from Jacques Tati's 1971 film Traffic. The 2006 Tanglewood production marked the work's first staged performances.
Tickets cost $10 ($8 for MoMA members, $5 for students, seniors, and staff of other museums) and are available at MoMA and through the museum's website. For more information, visit www.moma.org.
From Mao to the Met
May 9, 2008
The path to a successful career as an opera singer is difficult at best. But the road that led Chinese bass Hao Jiang Tian, currently starring as General Wang in Tan Dun's The First Emperor, from his homeland to the Metropolitan Opera is truly amazing. In his recently published memoir, Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met (John Wiley & Sons), Tian tells his captivating story.
On Monday, May 12 at 6:00 P.M., he will appear with co-author Lois B. Morris and China Institute President Sara Judge McCalpin in the Metropolitan Opera House's List Hall to discuss his book and talk about his career. Born the son of loyal Communists and musicians in the People's Liberation Army, Tian lived a privileged life until the Cultural Revolution. While working in a metal factory in Beijing as a 15-year-old, he realized that his "yuan," or fate, would be to do something else with his life. He went on to become the first Chinese-born opera singer to achieve lasting success on the world's stages and has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in more than 300 performances, opposite artists including Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and Kiri Te Kanawa.
Monday's event, which will include a Q&A with the audience, is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is required. To attend, or for further information, please call China Institute at 212-744-8181 x111.
'Good Thing': Martha at the Met
April 29, 2008
None other than Martha Stewart took a field trip to the Metropolitan Opera earlier this month to take a peek behind the gold curtain. She'll air a feature about her Met visit today on her nationally syndicated The Martha Stewart Show.
Martha and her nephew, baritone Christopher Herbert, met with General Manager Peter Gelb on the main stage and were shown around the set for Act II of Franco Zeffirelli's classic production of Puccini's La Bohème before exploring the backstage areas of the opera house. Her cameras looked in on a fitting with star soprano Angela Gheorghiu in the costume shop, where thousands of costumes are created each season, and paid a visit to the wig shop, where the Met's wigs and hairpieces are custom-made by hand. In the cavernous scenic shops the Met's technical director, Joseph Clark, explained the workings of the stage and how scenery is moved, constructed, painted, and repaired to a delighted Martha.
To see Martha's backstage feature, tune in Tuesday, April 29, at 1:00 pm on WNBC Channel 4 in New York, and on April 30 on the Fine Living Network (check local listings for dates and times). Starting April 30, you can also watch the feature on www.marthastewart.com.
Matthew Polenzani Receives Third Annual Beverly Sills Award
April 22, 2008
In a short ceremony on the Grand Tier, tenor Matthew Polenzani was presented with the Beverly Sills Artist Award today. Polenzani arrived directly from a rehearsal for the revival of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, opening this Saturday, in which he stars as Belmonte. The $50,000 award, established in 2006 by an endowment gift from Met Board member Agnes Varis and her husband, Karl Leichtman, in honor of the great soprano, is the largest of its kind in the United States.
Polenzani is the third recipient of the award, following baritone Nathan Gunn in 2006 and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in 2007. The prize, which was presented to him by Sills's daughter Muffy, is given to gifted singers between the ages of 25 and 40 who have already appeared in featured solo roles at the Met. "It was Beverly's wish that the award should go to a tenor this year," Dr. Varis said. Polenzani made his company debut in 1997 and has been an audience favorite ever since, appearing as Tamino, Alfredo, Roméo, Almaviva, and David, among many others.
Matthew Polenzani, at center, with Nathan Leventhal, former President of
Lincoln Center, Agnes Varis, General Manager Peter Gelb, and Muffy Sills
(from left) Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
New Fille Banner on the Met Façade
April 21, 2008
A new banner featuring an original artwork by renowned painter George Condo was unveiled today on the façade of the Met. Condo's painting was inspired by the new production of La Fille du Régiment, which opens today, and shows several of the opera's characters in the artist's trademark style. The original painting is also on view on the Grand Tier level of the Opera House through the end of the current opera season.
George Condo was born in 1957 in New Hampshire and educated at Lowell University, Massachusetts. His works have been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, as well as in galleries and museums in Mexico, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland. He received the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. He lives and works in New York City.
Fashion World to Turn Out for Opening of Fille
April 21, 2008
Stars of the catwalk, the big screen, and the pop charts will be in the audience for tonight's new production premiere of Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment.
Supermodel Naomi Campbell, actresses Diane Kruger, Eva Mendes, and Emmy Rossum, and pop-star-turned-opera-composer Rufus Wainwright will walk the red carpet and attend the Gala Benefit premiere, which is being underwritten by Yves Saint Laurent. The event marks the first in a series of collaborations with the legendary fashion house, which will sponsor a gala event in each of the next three seasons.
Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez star in Laurent Pelly's new production, which was called "the operatic show of the season" when it opened in London last year.
Satyagraha Opens to Critical Acclaim
April 17, 2008
The Met premiere of Satyagraha, Philip Glass's opera about Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence, brought a number of luminaries from the worlds of politics, religion, and the arts to the opera last Friday. Mahatma's grandson, writer and political activist Rajmohan Gandhi, was in the audience with his wife Usha and daughter Supriya. Other guests included director Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, playwright David Henry Hwang, film directors Paul Schrader and Neil Burger, monks Lama Pema Dorje, Gyaltsen Choepel, and Geshe Tsondu from Tibet, and artist Chuck Close (whose portraits of Glass are currently on view in Gallery Met).
Soloists, chorus, conductor Dante Anzolini, and the production team, headed by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, were greeted with thunderous applause, which reached its climax when composer Philip Glass stepped onto the stage to take a bow. Critical acclaim for the production is overwhelming. "Satyagraha emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity," says the New York Times, praising the "calm intensity and vocal grace" of the "excellent cast." Tenor Richard Croft, the Boston Globe writes, "sang Gandhi with a mellifluous and lyrical tenor that seemed at once to convey the strength of the historical subject and the sublime sadness of this music." The inventive staging and set design by McDermott and Crouch combines improvisational elements with puppetry and video projections. According to the Los Angeles Times, "the production is a work of genius that ranges from the very simple to the fantastically ambitious."
Satyagraha runs through May 1.
Composer Philip Glass (at left) with Rajmohan Gandhi and his wife and
daughter Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Glass with Lama Pema Dorje, Gyaltsen Choepel, Geshe Tsondu, and guests
from the Tibet House Photo: Elena Park/Metropolitan Opera
Rajmohan Gandhi greets the Tibetan visitors
Photo: Elena Park/Metropolitan Opera
Open House for La Fille du Régiment
April 10, 2008
The Met opens its doors to the general public for the third and final free, day-long Open House of the season. On April 18, audiences will get a preview of things to come with the Dress Rehearsal for Laurent Pelly’s hilarious new production of La Fille du Régiment, which premieres three days later. Natalie Dessay stars in the title role, and tenor Juan Diego Flórez sings her lover, with Marco Armiliato conducting. Following the rehearsal, members of the cast and the production team will be on hand for a Q&A on the main stage. Special exhibits featuring set and costume designs will be set up around the opera house. Doors will open at 10:00 A.M.
We regret that due to overwhelming demand, there are no more tickets available for the Open House and the dress rehearsal. If you have a reservation, please pick up your tickets at the Box Office by 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, April 16. Please bring your web order confirmation or order number with you.
The performance on Saturday, April 26, will be shown Live in HD in movie theaters around the world.
Voigt and Heppner Together At Last
March 29, 2008
Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner finally took the stage together last night in their first joint performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Both had originally been scheduled to sing the entire six-performance run, but illness prevented them from appearing together. In a curious twist of fate, for this final night Margaret Jane Wray, who was supposed to sing Brangäne, had to bow out. In her place, Michelle DeYoung, who had sung the previous five performances, took over the part. "It seems this season we're unable to give a performance of Tristan without some sort of announcement," stage manager Thomas Connell joked when he informed the audience of the cast change. The performance was streamed live on the Met website. Leading an ensemble of today's foremost Wagner singers that also included Matti Salminen as King Marke and Eike Wilm Schulte as Kurwenal, Music Director James Levine conducted a memorable account of Wagner's score. The audience thanked the artists with a ten-minute standing ovation for a singularly exciting night of opera that is sure to be remembered in Met history.
The Satya Graha Forum
March 29, 2008
The Met premiere of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha, opening April 11, has also inspired events outside of the Met's presentation. The Satya Graha Forum, a collaboration of New York cultural, arts, environmental, educational, and spiritual institutions working with Glass, has launched an initiative to create a dialogue on Gandhi's concept of social change. The Forum, which kicks off on April 6 with a gathering at the Gandhi statue in Union Square Park, will present events, lectures, and performances throughout the month of April. For more information, go to www.satya-graha.org.
Giuseppe Di Stefano Dies at Age 86
March 28, 2008
Italian tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano died on March 3 in his home near Milan, Italy. He made his Met debut in 1948 as the Duke in Rigoletto and sang 15 roles in 112 performances with the company, making his final Met appearance in 1965. Among his Met repertoire were the title role of Faust, des Grieux in Manon, Alfredo in La Traviata, Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore, and Rodolfo in La Bohème. A frequent stage and recording partner of Maria Callas, Di Stefano possessed one of the most beautiful and instantly recognizable voices of the post-World War II era. The performance of La Bohème on April 1 is dedicated to his memory.
Live on the Web! Voigt and Heppner Together in Tristan
March 27, 2008
Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner, originally scheduled to star in all six performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde this season, are scheduled to sing together on Friday night. Illness has prevented them from taking the stage together until this final Tristan of the season, conducted by James Levine. To celebrate their very first full performance together—anywhere—of this epic opera, the Met will stream the performance live on its website.
Visit MetOpera.org at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 28, to hear Voigt and Heppner live from the Met in Tristan und Isolde.
Great Performances at the Met
March 26, 2007
Good news for opera fans who’d like to recreate the Live in HD experience in their living rooms. Beginning March 30, 14 of the Met’s transmissions will be presented on PBS as Sunday afternoon broadcasts in their Great Performances at the Met series. “The opera-loving public throughout the world has embraced our live HD transmissions into movie theaters,” says General Manager Peter Gelb. “We are pleased to now bring these same programs directly to the homes of our loyal PBS audience.” The spring HD marathon kicks off with Richard Jones’s imaginative production of Hansel and Gretel and runs through June 29, with Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment as the finale. All performances will be presented in high definition and 5.1 digital surround sound.
For showtimes, visit the Great Performances at the Met website
The Met Mourns the Loss of Anthony Minghella
March 18, 2008
View a photo tribute to Anthony Minghella
“Anthony was a great friend to all of the arts,” General Manager Peter Gelb said of director Anthony Minghella, who died unexpectedly today at age 54. “He and I had planned a lifetime of collaboration. Everyone at the Met loved him, and we will miss him.”
Minghella directed an acclaimed production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly that opened the Met’s 2006–07 season, the first of Gelb’s tenure. An instant hit with critics and audiences in both London, where it premiered at English National Opera, and in New York, the production captured the attention of the entire city when it premiered on the Met stage and on giant screens in Times Square.
Minghella was beloved by the Met’s staff, performers, and stage hands alike. The chorus even created a special award for him and his wife, Carolyn Choa, Butterfly’s choreographer and associate director, which they presented in a private ceremony a few hours before the production premiered. At the time of his death, Minghella was collaborating on a new opera for the Met with composer Osvaldo Golijov, for which he was writing the libretto and which he was slated to direct.
Minghella is survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, his son, Max, and his daughter, Hannah.