Highlighted e-videos - Met Opera on Demand: Home

PERFORMANCE DATE: OCT 9, 2021
After an absence of nearly two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, spectacular live opera returned to cinemas worldwide with the launch of the Met’s 2021–22 Live in HD season. And this stirring performance of Boris Godunov—presented in Mussorgsky’s original one-act version from 1869—proved a perfect way to inaugurate the new season. Renowned German bass René Pape gives a riveting performance as the tortured title tsar, reprising a harrowing portrayal that he first brought to the Met a decade earlier, with Maestro Sebastian Weigle on the podium to lead the full forces of the Met Orchestra and Chorus. Alongside Pape, the sterling ensemble cast also features tenor David Butt Philip as Grigory, tenor Maxim Paster as Shuisky, baritone Aleksey Bogdanov as Shchelkalov, bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as Varlaam, and bass Ain Anger as Pimen in a vivid staging by director Stephen Wadsworth.

PERFORMANCE DATE: MAR 31, 2018
In this new production of Mozart’s effervescent comedy of young love and infidelity, director Phelim McDermott and his team of designers have updated the opera’s setting to a boardwalk amusement park inspired by Coney Island in the 1950s. The result is a twisted playground in which the two pairs of lovers at the heart of the tale find themselves on one emotional, and sometimes literal, thrill ride after another. Performed as part of the Met’s Live in HD series of cinema transmissions, the production features a cast of breakout young artists—soprano Amanda Majeski, mezzo-soprano Serena Malfi, tenor Ben Bliss, and bass-baritone Adam Plachetka. Baritone Christopher Maltman, as the scheming Don Alfonso, and Tony Award–winning actress Kelli O’Hara, who triumphed in her 2014 Met debut in Lehár’s The Merry Widow, join the quartet of rising stars. David Robertson conducts Mozart’s colorful and heartfelt score.

PERFORMANCE DATE: DEC 15, 2018
Any new Met production of Verdi’s beloved tragedy La Traviata would be noteworthy, but Michael Mayer’s dazzling staging, which premiered during the 2018–19 season, was doubly significant as it marked Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s first performances as the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director. On the podium for this Live in HD transmission, Nézet-Séguin leads a starry ensemble. As Violetta, the consumptive heroine fighting to find true happiness, soprano Diana Damrau delivers yet another compelling portrayal on the Met stage. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez sings his first Verdi role with the company, as Violetta’s ardent yet impetuous lover, Alfredo, and baritone Quinn Kelsey rounds out the principal cast as Giorgio Germont, Alfredo’s implacable father.

PERFORMANCE DATE: DEC 31, 2020
After one of the most challenging years in the company’s history, the Met left 2020 on a high note, presenting a live New Year’s Eve Gala featuring a quartet of extraordinary artists. As part of the Met Stars Live in Concert series, sopranos Angel Blue and Pretty Yende and tenors Javier Camarena and Matthew Polenzani came together at the Parktheater in Augsburg, Germany, to perform a program packed with popular operatic excerpts. Accompanied by pianist Cécile Restier and the Vienna Morphing Quintet, the evening featured arias and ensembles by Donizetti, Puccini, Rossini, Verdi, and more—as well as some festive Italian songs. A delightful and uplifting musical event, the concert had viewers worldwide smiling long after the clock struck midnight.

PERFORMANCE DATE: MAR 10, 2018
A rarely performed bel canto gem, Rossini’s Semiramide returned to the Met for the first time in nearly 25 years during the 2017–18 season. Set in ancient Babylon under the reign of the mythic Queen Semiramis, the opera features political scheming, mistaken identity, divine intervention, and bloodthirsty revenge—not to mention one virtuosic vocal display after another. Soprano Angela Meade is the fierce title monarch, whose quest for power comes to a halt with the discovery that the object of her affection, the warrior Arsace—sung by mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong—may actually be her long-lost son. Together, the two square off in a pair of dazzling duets and deliver some of the opera’s most challenging arias, including Semiramide’s famous “Bel raggio lusinghier.” Bel canto specialist Maurizio Benini takes the podium to lead a cast that also stars tenor Javier Camarena as the ardent prince Idreno, bass Ildar Abdrazakov as the scheming Assur, and bass Ryan Speedo Green as the stern high priest Oroe.

PERFORMANCE DATE: MAY 22, 2021
The popular Met Stars Live in Concert series went out on a high note—or several—on May 22, 2021, when three of opera’s leading lights came together amid the regal splendor of the Royal Opera of Versailles. Sopranos Ailyn Pérez and Nadine Sierra joined mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard for a dazzling program of arias, duets, and trios. Accompanied by pianist Vlad Iftinca, the concert featured favorite operatic selections by Gounod, Mozart, Bellini, Strauss, and more, as well as some enchanting Spanish songs featuring special guest Pablo Sáinz-Villegas on guitar. It was a fittingly celebratory and uplifting finale to a series that brought many of greatest artists into homes around world while the Met was unable to perform due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

PERFORMANCE DATE: SEP 11, 2021
Following a historic 18-month closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Met returned to live performances in the opera house on September 11, 2021, with an unforgettable concert of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, presented in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s dynamic Music Director, took the podium to lead this moving musical event, which showcased the full forces of the Met Orchestra and Chorus and featured a quartet of compelling soloists—soprano Ailyn Pérez, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, tenor Matthew Polenzani, and bass-baritone Eric Owens. From the somber opening bars to the anguished cries for salvation in the final “Libera me,” the performance was both a touching tribute and a stirring reminder of the power of music even in the most challenging times.