Ruth Leon recommends…Now the Metropolitan Opera ends its free streams

Met Nightly Opera Stream – Viewers Choice
Click here to watch :  free until end of this week

Sadly, after this week, the Met is ceasing its free nightly opera stream. Now that they’re gearing up for the new live season in the Metropolitan Opera House, they’re abandoning those of us who don’t live in New York or can’t afford the tickets. It has been a simply wonderful boon to be able to see great singers in their most important roles, many of whom are no longer performing. The schedule has included outstanding complete performances from the past 14 years of cinema transmissions, starring all of opera’s greatest singers. each performance available for a period of 23 hours, from 7:30 p.m. EDT until 6:30 p.m. the following day.

For this final week, the Met has asked viewers to choose their favourites and, unsurprisingly, we have chosen the most famous, sung by the most famous. It’s a wonderful panoply and a reminder of why we need the world’s great opera companies, no matter how chaotic their management or absurdly high their ticket prices. They represent the highest of high art and losing that would be to lose part of what makes us human.

Even if you’ve seen them all already, if you’re an opera lover you will be glued to your screens this week for Jonathan Miller’s production of Les Nozze di Figaro starring Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Susanne Mentzer, Dwayne Croft, and Bryn Terfel on Monday, Zeffirelli’s Cav and Pag starring Tatiana Troyanos, Jean Kraft, Plácido Domingo, and Vern Shinall, Teresa Stratas, Plácido Domingo, Sherrill Milnes, and Allan Monk on Tuesday, Bizet’s Les Pecheurs des Perles on Wednesday, with Diana Damrau, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecień, and Nicolas Testé, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. On Thursday we get Bartlett Sher’s production of Les Contes d’ Hoffmann, sung by Erin Morley, Hibla Gerzmava, Kate Lindsey, Christine Rice, Vittorio Grigolo, and Thomas Hampson, Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, on Friday, with Natalie Dessay, Felicity Palmer, Juan Diego Flórez and Alessandro Corbelli, Saturday is Il Trovatore in David McVicar’s production, with Anna Netrebko, Dolora Zajick, Yonghoon Lee, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, conducted by Marco Armiliato, and Sunday brings us Un Ballo in Maschera with Sondra Radvanovsky, Kathleen Kim, Stephanie Blythe, Marcelo Álvarez, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, conducted by Fabio Luisi.

E busta! That’s it for the Free Nightly Streams which have given so many of us so much pleasure.

Met Opera on Demand
​Click here to subscribe
We can still access the Met’s archive via Met Opera On Demand but now we have to pay for it. It costs $14.99/month or $149.99/year, which doesn’t seem to me excessive for this extraordinary collection of operas and stars. They’ll even give you a week’s free trial.

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