7 New Productions Next Year at Met
Fresh Offerings Highlight Metropolitan Opera Season
Seven New Productions highlight the 2007/08 season at the Metropolitan Opera. Opera Company continues to bring opera to the masses. Met increases opera transmissions.
Seven new productions highlight the Metropolitan Opera’s 2007/2008 season. This marks the most new productions in a season since the 1966 season. This is a part of the new Metropolitan Opera general director, Peter Gelb’s attempt to re-energize the experience for Met patrons by providing dynamic productions and great directors while enhancing the reputation of having the finest singers.
New productions include Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor directed by Tony Award winner Mary Zimmerman. The production of Lucia will be broadcast on opening night on the big screen in Times Square in an attempt to try to make the opera more accessible to the general public. Other new productions include a new production of Verdi’s MacBeth and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. This is the first time since 1917 that Met audiences will have the opportunity to see a production of Gluck’s final work.
A new production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, is this year’s holiday family offering. Hansel and Gretel is the Met’s second in a series of new holiday productions, following this year’s successful English-language production of The Magic Flute. Tony Award winning director for Sweeny Todd, John Doyle, directs a new production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. Composer Philip Glass’s landmark 1980 opera, Satyagraha, is being offered as a part of the Met’s commitment to important contemporary operas that have yet to be performed in the house. The final new production for 07/08 is a co-production with the Royal Opera House and Vienna State Opera of the highly successful La Fille du Régiment (Donizetti), starring Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez.
The Metropolitan Opera also announced that it will increase the number of televised live performances to movie houses from 6 to 8. “Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD,” a series of live performance transmissions shown in high definition in movie theaters throughout North America, Europe, and Japan has been highly successful. The transmissions have grown from 60 movie theaters for the first showing to over 230, with most of the performances being sold out.
