By Robert Croan
There are limited opportunities to attend live opera performances in South Florida. In the upcoming season, Miami-based Florida Grand Opera will present four productions in the Arsht Center, repeating three of them in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center; while Palm Beach Opera offers three productions in Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. And they’re all pricey. You might catch a student performance at one of the area universities, but that’s about it.
There’s another option, however. The Met: Live in HD, starting its 16th season, will broadcast 10 Saturday matinee performance from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in 20 area cinemas, each with an “encore” showing the following Wednesday evening. While nothing can replace the thrill of attending a live performance in person, the series transmitted through Fathom Events has become the most accessible and affordable option for aficionados and new operagoers to get to hear opera on a regular basis.
Sadly, the Met’s weekly Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts — a great American cultural tradition since 1931 — are not available in this area, although they may be streamed from NPR and other FM stations elsewhere in the United States. The cinema simulcasts now cover approximately one third of the Met’s repertory in any season.
The 2022-23 Met: Live in HD season begins October 22 with a significant rarity, Luigi Cherubini’s Medea. Originally performed in French in Paris in 1797, this setting of a play by Pierre Corneille — which in turn was based on the classic Greek tragedy by Euripides — was successfully revived in many languages and revisions during the 19th century.
In 1953, the iconic Maria Callas made the role her own in a hybrid Italian version, which is the version that the Met will use. A live recording with Callas has become the touchstone for subsequent interpreters. In the Met’s production, a premiere for the company, the title part will be taken by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky — staged by David McVicar, with Matthew Polenzani as her Argonaut husband, Jason. The role of Glauce, Medea’s rival in love (and her victim), will be taken by Janai Brugger, familiar locally for her critically acclaimed lead-role performances in Palm Beach Opera’s Don Pasquale and The Marriage of Figaro.
The second Live in HD simulcast, Nov. 5, will showcase Nadine Sierra in the iconic role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. The Fort Lauderdale native, 34, is a local favorite, who last year pleased live and HD audiences in the title role of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The production is a revival of the Michael Meyer/Christine Jones conception that debuted in December 2018 and ran on the Live in HD series that month.
Two American operas are listed this season. The world premiere staging of Kevin Puts’s The Hours will be shown Dec. 10; Terrence Blanchard’s 2013 opera Champion — a Met premiere — is set for April 29.
Puts’s The Hours, adapted from Michael Cunningham’s novel (subsequently made into an Oscar-winning film), depicts three women from different eras as they are affected by Virginia Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel Mrs. Dalloway. In an all-star cast, Joyce DiDonato will portray the author herself, writing in 1923 and afflicted by suicidal tendencies; Kelli O’Hara will be Laura Brown, the wife of a World War II veteran, planning her husband’s birthday party in 1949; while Renee Fleming will enact Clarissa Vaughan, the protagonist’s modern-day counterpart, arranging a celebration for an award about to be given to a poet dying of AIDS in 1999.
Blanchard’s jazz-inspired Champion will star bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as the real-life African-American boxer Emile Griffith, who overcame poverty, racism and homophobia to become a world champion. The Met’s music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct both new works.
In addition to the above, there will be four more new productions. Giordano’s Fedora, also staged by McVicar, will serve as a vehicle for Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva, on Jan. 28. Wagner’s Lohengrin, led by Nézet-Séguin and staged by Franҫois Girard, has Piotr Beczala in the title part on March 18. Nathalie Stutzmann, renowned as one of the world’s great contraltos, will switch to conducting two Mozart Operas: Don Giovanni, staged by Ivo van Hove with Peter Mattei in the title role on May 20; and The Magic Flute, produced and choreographed by Simon McBurney on June 3.
A December 2006 filming of the previous Magic Flute production by Julie Taymore, abridged and sung in English, will be encored on Dec. 3.
Two more revivals, both staged by Robert Carsen, round out the season: Verdi’s Falstaff, conducted by Daniel Ristoni with Michael Volle in the title role, on April 1; and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, with Simone Young conducting Isabel Leonard in the title part of Octavian, and Lise Davidsen as the Marschallin, April 15.
Starting times for each Saturday matinee are 12:55 p.m., except for Lohengrin and Der Rosenkavalier (noon), and Falstaff (12:30 p.m.). Each of the live performances will be followed by an encore presentation the following Wednesday evening. Most of them will also appear later on TV as part of PBS’s Great Performances series.
For complete details including a list of theaters near you, check www.metopera.org/season/in-cinemas/, or www.fathomevents.com.