Nightly Opera Streams, February 22–28

This week of Nightly Opera Streams pays tributes to Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the beloved Russian baritone who passed away tragically in 2017. Celebrate his extraordinary career with seven of his most riveting Met appearances. Explore the full lineup with this guide to the week.

View the Playbills from the original performance dates for each stream, including synopses, program notes, and more.

The extraordinary and beloved Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died in 2017, appears in this week’s streams of Un Ballo in Maschera and Il Trovatore. Learn more about his celebrated Met career and watch highlights from all of his Live in HD performances.

Orchestra and stage rehearsals, costume fittings, and conversations with the all-star cast: Go backstage with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Renée Fleming, and conductor Valery Gergiev as they prepare for the 2007 performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

This week, an audio playlist featuring excerpts from some of Hvorostovsky’s outstanding Met radio-broadcast performances is available for free listening on Met Opera on Demand.

Offering access to more than 700 complete performances of more than 150 operas, Met Opera on Demand allows subscribers to sift through 85 years of company history—including a dozen performances of La Traviata.

Tchaikovsky’s romantic adaptation of Pushkin got a slow start at the Metropolitan, but, especially in recent decades, it has become the most popular Russian opera in the company’s repertoire.

With his 2012 production of Un Ballo in Maschera, set in a cinematic Swedish atmosphere, director David Alden aimed to integrate the stylistic paradoxes of Verdi’s endlessly intriguing opera.

Verdi’s La Traviata was first presented by the nascent Metropolitan Opera Company during the third week of its inaugural season in 1883. Since then, the opera has appeared more than 1,000 times, starring more than 100 different sopranos as Violetta.

One of opera’s greatest voices, Dolora Zajick has delivered knockout Met performances of many of the repertory’s most dramatic mezzo-soprano roles over the past three decades.

It seems only yesterday that Angela Meade was a voice student competing in the Met’s National Council Auditions. Now she’s one of opera’s most celebrated stars. The genial diva discusses her rise to the top ranks of the world’s sopranos.

On this episode of our Aria Code podcast, soprano Diana Damrau discusses portraying one of opera’s most complex heroines, Violetta in Verdi’s tragic La Traviata.

In Sir David McVicar’s 2009 staging, Verdi’s Il Trovatore reclaimed its place as a dramatic—not just musical—masterwork.

Throwing herself wholly into every role she played, French soprano Natalie Dessay was one of the Met’s most magnetic artists for more than two decades.

Love, heartbreak, and death: a classic tragedy and a classic opera. Learn more about Verdi’s La Traviata with our In Focus podcast

The operas of Giuseppe Verdi have been performed around 5,700 times at the Metropolitan Opera, more than those of any other composer by a wide margin.

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