New Year’s Eve online gala will see opera stars sparkle
Stars of The Met Opera will be performing arias, duets and ensembles from Donizetti to Puccini in a
New Year’s Eve gala concert that will be live-streamed to homes around the world.
Angel Blue, Javier Camarena, Matthew Polenzani, and Pretty Yende will also be performing an arrangement of operetta and Neapolitan songs that will go out on The Met’s website at 9pm and be available on demand for 14 days.
The concert will be filmed in Parktheater, Augsburg, Germany. Constructed of glass and cast iron in the 19th century, the theatre was designed to look like English pleasure gardens of that period.
Multiple cameras will shoot the gala and will be linked by satellite to a control room in New York City, where host Christine Goerke will be situated.
Gary Halvorson, the Met’s award-winning director of the company’s Live in HD cinema transmissions, will direct.
The concert can be viewed on a computer, mobile device, or home entertainment system (via Chromecast or AirPlay).
The New Year’s Eve Gala replaces the previously scheduled concert by Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena that was postponed last month with ticket-holders for that performance automatically moved to the gala on December 31.
Angel Blue’s solo concert, previously scheduled for December 19, will be postponed to a later date, to be announced soon.
The gala concert forms part of The Met Opera Live In Concert series which features a line-up of some of opera’s leading artists performing in striking locations across Europe and the United States.
Concerts presented since its inception last summer include Jonas Kaufmann from Polling, Bavaria, on July 18; soprano Renée Fleming in Washington, DC, on August 1; tenor Roberto Alagna and soprano Aleksandra Kurzak in Èze, France, on August
16; soprano Lise Davidsen in Oslo, Norway, on August 29; mezzo-soprano Joyce
DiDonato in Bochum, Germany, on September 12; and soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Joseph Calleja in Caserta, Italy, on October 24.
Future concerts will feature Sondra Radvanovsky and Piotr Beczała (January 23) as well as Anna Netrebko (February 6).
The Met Opera, which is located in New York, plans to resume live performances on September 27, 2021, with a company premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up My Bones - the first opera by a Black composer to be performed at the Met.
Meanwhile, tickets for the Met Stars Live in Concert: New Year’s Eve Gala can be purchased now at the metopera.org website. Gala Committee tickets, with enhanced benefits, are also available at a range of donation levels.