Live at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera's award-winning series of live, high definition opera transmissions to theaters around the world, will return to the 1891 Fredonia Opera House for its 2012-13 season with 12 new productions. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, this year's Met season features several of the master composer's operas.
The series opens on Oct. 13, at 1 p.m., with Gaetano Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, starring Anna Netrebko, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecien. It ends in April with George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare, starring David Daniels as Julius Ceasar and Natalie Dessay as Cleopatra.
The season features a total of seven new productions including two Metropolitan Opera premieres. One of the premieres, The Tempest, will be conducted by its composer Thomas Ades . International stars featured in the season include such favorites as Daniels, Dessay, Stephanie Blythe, Joyce DiDonato, Kwiecien, Netrebko, Renee Fleming, Marcello Giordani, Jonas Kaufmann, Rene Pape, Polenzani and Deborah Voigt, among others.
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Superstar soprano Anna Netrebko stars in Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore, which kicks off the 2012-13 Live at the Met season at 1 p.m., on Saturday, Oct. 13, at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House. The New York Times calls her portrayal “feisty and earthy one moment, poignant and shimmering the next.”
"We're very excited to be participating in our second full season of Live at the Met broadcasts," notes Opera House Executive Director Rick Davis. "Our audience for these productions has been building slowly; and the feedback we've received has been tremendous. There's just something exhilarating about seeing an opera production here in Fredonia at the same time audiences in NYC are seeing it live."
Live at the Met is the world's leading provider of alternative cinema content, and is now shown in more than 1,700 theaters in 54 countries, making the Met the only arts institution with an ongoing global art series of this scale. The Met was the first arts company to experiment as an alternative content provider, beginning on a modest scale in 2006. Since then, its program has grown every season, with more than 9.6 million tickets sold to date.
Met opera stars serve as hosts for the series, conducting live interviews with cast, crew and production teams, and introducing the popular behind-the-scenes features; altogether the worldwide audience is given an unprecedented look at what goes into the staging of an opera at one of the world's great houses.
"Our live transmissions continue to transform the public's perception of opera and to excite our performers and our audiences around the world," says Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb. "For our entire company, there is nothing quite like one of our adrenaline-packed Saturday matinee broadcasts."
The full 2012-13 Live at the Met season includes: L'Elisir D'Amore on Oct. 13; Verdi's Otello on Oct. 27; Ades' The Tempest on Nov. 10; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito on Dec. 1; Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera on Dec.8; Verdi's Aida on Dec. 15; Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens; Donizetti's Maria Stuarda on Jan. 19; Verdi's Rigoletto on Feb. 16; Richard Wagner's Parsifal on Mar. 2; Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini on mar. 16; and Giulio Cesare on Apr. 27.
Individual tickets to each of the operas are $20, ($18 Opera House members, $15 students). The Opera House offers two subscription ticket offerings this year. A full subscription to all 12 operas is $210. The Opera House also is offering a new flexible opera subscription consisting of nine tickets that can be used however the patron wants one at a time to nine different operas, all at once for nine people, or anything in between. The flexible opera subscription is $161.
Live at the Met opera broadcasts are made possible by Dr. James M. and Marcia Merrins, who funded the purchase of the satellite transmission and projection equipment used in the series. Additional support comes from Bob and Shirley Coon, Bob and Susan Dilks, Steve and Mary Rees and DFT Communications.
Chautauqua County's only performing arts center presenting its own programming year-round, the 1891 Fredonia Opera House is a member-supported not-for-profit organization located in Village Hall in downtown Fredonia. For a complete schedule of events, visit www.fredopera.org.
