Live at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera’s award-winning series of live, high definition (HD) opera transmissions to theaters around the world, continues its 2024-25 season at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House Performing Arts Center on Saturday, May 17, at 1 p.m., with Richard Strauss’s Salome.

Met Music Director Yannick Nezet-Séeuin takes the podium to conduct Strauss’s one-act tragedy, transmitted live from the Met stage. 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 production runs two hours, 15 minutes with no intermission.

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.

Individual tickets to each of the operas in the Live at the Met season are $20, ($18 Opera House members, $10 students). Tickets may be purchased in person at the Opera House Box Office or by phone at 716-679-1891, Tuesday-Friday, 12-4:30 p.m., at the door, or online anytime at www.fredopera.org.

Part of the Arts in the Afternoon at the Opera House, which is sponsored by Dr. James M. & Marcia Merrins, Live at the Met is underwritten with support from Daniel S. Kaufman and Timothy W. Beaver

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House Performing Arts Center is a member-supported not-for-profit performing arts center with a mission to “present the performing arts for the benefit of our community and region … providing access to artistic diversity … and high quality programming at an affordable price.” It is located in Village Hall in downtown Fredonia. For a complete schedule of events, visit www.fredopera.org.