Irish National Opera partners with The Metropolitan Opera to present The Met: Live in HD in cinemas throughout Ireland

Irish National Opera partners with The Metropolitan Opera to present The Met: Live in HD in cinemas in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Limerick, Sligo and Wexford.

Irish National Opera is delighted to announce a new partnership with the Metropolitan Opera New York. INO will be presenting The Met: Live in HD  2022–23 season featuring live transmissions of ten spectacular productions in cinemas throughout Ireland. The new season kicks off with Cherubini’s Medea, on Saturday 22 October with Sondra Radvanovsky starring as the mythic sorceress who will stop at nothing in her quest for vengeance.

“Our 2022–23 Live in HD season picks up where we will have left off at the end of the current season, with more new productions and more Met premieres than in recent decades,” said Met General Manager Peter Gelb. “Our lessons learned during the two years of the pandemic are that the future of the Met, and of opera, rely upon ceaselessly breaking new and diverse artistic ground. It’s our path forward.”

In November Live in HD audiences will have the chance to see Michael Mayer’s celebrated production of La Traviata starring soprano Nadine Sierra as the self-sacrificing courtesan Violetta —one of opera’s ultimate heroines in Verdi’s beloved tragedy. In January 2023 Umberto Giordano’s exhilarating drama Fedora returns to the Met repertory for the first time in 25 years. Packed with memorable melodies, showstopping arias and explosive confrontations, it  requires a cast of thrilling voices to take flight, and the Met’s new production promises to deliver. Soprano Sonya Yoncheva, one of today’s most riveting artists, sings the title role of the 19th-century Russian princess who falls in love with her fiancé’s murderer, Count Loris, sung by star tenor Piotr Beczała.

Next March Wagner’s soaring masterpiece Lohengrin will make its triumphant return to the Met stage after 17 years. In a sequel to his revelatory production of  Parsifal, director François Girard unveils an atmospheric staging that weds his striking visual style and keen dramatic insight to Wagner’s breath-taking music. The supreme cast is led by tenor Piotr Beczała in the title role of the mysterious swan knight. Soprano Tamara Wilson is the virtuous duchess Elsa, falsely accused of murder.

In April 2023 baritone Michael Volle stars as the caddish knight Falstaff, gleefully tormented by a trio of clever women who deliver his comeuppance, in Verdi’s glorious Shakespearean comedy Falstaff. Also in April, a dream cast assemble for Strauss’s grand Viennese comedy Der Rosenkavalier. Soprano Lise Davidsen is the aristocratic Marschallin, opposite mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard as her lover Octavian, and soprano Erin Morley as Sophie, the beautiful younger woman who steals his heart.

Six-time Grammy Award–winning composer Terence Blanchard brings Champion, his first opera to the Met after his  Fire Shut Up in My Bones  triumphantly premiered with the company to universal acclaim in 2021. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green is the young boxer Emile Griffith, who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, and bass-baritone Eric Owens portrays Griffith’s older self, haunted by the ghosts of his past. Soprano Latonia Moore is Emelda Griffith, the boxer’s estranged mother, and mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is the bar owner Kathy Hagan.

Maestro Nathalie Stutzmann makes her Met debut conducting a star-studded cast led by baritone Peter Mattei as a magnetic Don Giovanni, alongside the Leporello of bass-baritone Adam Plachetka. Sopranos Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, and Ying Fang make a superlative trio as Giovanni’s conquests—Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina—and tenor Ben Bliss is Don Ottavio. Tony Award–winning director Ivo van Hove makes a major Met debut with a new take on Mozart’s tragicomedy, re-setting the familiar tale of deceit and damnation in an abstract architectural landscape and shining a light into the dark corners of the story and its characters.

In his Met-debut staging of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in June 2023, director Simon McBurney lets loose a volley of theatrical flourishes, incorporating projections, sound effects, and acrobatics to match the spectacle and drama of Mozart’s fable. Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the Met Orchestra and the brilliant cast includes soprano Erin Morley as Pamina, tenor Lawrence Brownlee as Tamino, baritone Thomas Oliemans as Papageno, soprano Kathryn Lewek as the Queen of the Night, and bass Stephen Milling as Sarastro.