Pearls from the Met
Santa Fe’s opera lovers will remember Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) from our hometown company’s production of 2012. This undeniably lovely work has been getting greater play in recent decades, and this season the Metropolitan Opera is offering it for the first time since Caruso sang it there a century ago. The Met lacks the matchless backdrop of the sun going down over the Jemez Mountains, but we imagine they will get by somehow. Local viewers can catch it as a Met: Live in HD simulcast at the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.) at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 16, with a re-screening that evening at 6 p.m. Tickets ($22-$28 in the morning, all seats $22 for the evening) are available by calling 505-988-1234 or by visiting www.ticketssantafe.org. Soprano Diana Damrau appears as the priestess Leïla, tenor Matthew Polenzani portrays Nadir, and a singer familiar from our home stage takes the role of Zurga: baritone Mariusz Kwiecien´ , who has starred here as Don Giovanni (2004), Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro (2008), and King Roger (2012). The conductor is Gianandrea Nosedra, who just last week was named music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.