Montrealer to take over Met Opera next season
Montreal’s Yannick NezetSeguin will become the Metropolitan Opera’s music director next season, two years earlier than planned, providing a leader to an orchestra fighting drift and defections for more than a decade.
Nezet-Seguin’s appointment was announced in June 2016, two months after Parkinson’s disease caused the end of James Levine’s 40 year-run. The company announced Nezet-Seguin would start a five-year contract in 2020-21 after three seasons as music director designate.
Levine became music director emeritus but was suspended in December following multiple allegations of sexual harassment from the 1960s to 1980s.
Nezet-Seguin studied piano, conducting, composition and chamber music at the Conservatoire de musique du Quebec in Montreal and choral conducting at the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. He became artistic director
and principal conductor of Montreal’s Orchestre Metropolitain in 2000 and also went on to work with leading orchestras in Philadephia and Rotterdam.
The Met said Thursday that Nezet-Seguin had opened additional time in his schedule and will conduct 17 performances next season, agreeing to add a revival of Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande’’ to his previous commitment of a new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata’’ and a revival of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmelites.’’ He will conduct three operas in 201920,
then at least five each season starting in 2020-21.
“I think he realizes how important it is for the Met to have a music director who can also handle the important decisionmaking that only a musical director from a contractural point of view can do in terms of tenured positions in the orchestra,’’ Met general manager Peter Gelb said.
“This obviously has not been the easiest time for the company with the news about maestro Levine, so it will be very comforting
and reassuring to the orchestra and the chorus to know his tenure is starting earlier than originally planned.’’