The Met’s 2015 Summer HD Festival: Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle

Tuesday, September 1, 7:30 PM: IOLANTA/BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE

Only 3,100 free seats available.

Valery Gergiev conducts and Mariusz Treliński directs a provocative  and critically acclaimed double bill, beginning with the company premiere of Tchaikovsky’s fairy tale Iolanta. Anna Netrebko stars as the title character, a blind princess, with Piotr Beczala as the heroic Vaudémont and Aleksei Markov as Robert. Bluebeard’s Castle stars Mikhail Petrenko as the forbidding title character and Nadja Michael as Judith, his unlucky new bride. (Original transmission: February 14, 2015).

Approximate running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes 

About The Summer HD Festival

The Metropolitan Opera’s annual Summer HD Festival, which presents free outdoor screenings of operas on Lincoln Center Plaza each summer, will return with 10 screenings of performances featuring the company’s leading artists in a varied selection of operas by Bartók, Bizet, Gounod, Mozart, Offenbach, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi, running on consecutive nights from August 29 through September 7. In addition, this year’s festival will open on Friday, August 28 at 8 p.m. with a special presentation of the classic 1961 movie musical West Side Story. The film, which won 10 Academy Awards and features a score by Leonard Bernstein, is largely set in the neighborhood where Lincoln Center now stands. This screening is co-presented with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which also co-presented the Met’s screening of Moonstruck last summer.

The Summer HD Festival will continue on Saturday, August 29 at 7:45 p.m. with the first of 10 opera screenings: a performance of Bizet’s Carmen from 2010, starring Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna as the fiery gypsy and her doomed lover, Don José. Several Live in HD performances from the Met’s 2014-15 season will be screened this summer, including Verdi’s Macbeth with Anna Netrebko as the title character’s ruthlessly ambitious bride; Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, starring Vittorio Grigolo as the title poet; and the double bill of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, starring Netrebko as a blind princess, and Bartók’s harrowing Bluebeard’s Castle. Other screenings will include Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, Puccini’s triple-bill Il Trittico, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, which, like West Side Story, is based on Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy of star-crossed love. The festival will conclude on Monday, September 7 at 8 p.m. with a screening of Verdi’s grand Aida.

A complete schedule is available below.

Each evening of the festival, more than 3,100 seats on the plaza will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, as well as additional space for overflow crowds. No tickets are required, and there are no rain dates.

The Summer HD Festival is generously supported by The Robert W. Wilson Charitable Trust.  Additional funding is provided by the Ford Foundation.

The Met: Live in HD series is made possible by a generous grant from its founding sponsor, The Neubauer Family Foundation.  Global sponsorship of The Met: Live in HD is also provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.