Live from the Met

The great Marilyn Horne stars in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s charming production of Rossini’s opera. Isabella (Horne) has been shipwrecked while trying to find her lost lover, Lindoro (Douglas Ahlstedt) who, it turns out, has been captured by Mustafà, the Bey of Algiers (Paolo Montarsolo). Isabella has conveniently been cast ashore near the palace of Mustafà, who in turn is immediately smitten with her, and comedy ensues. Met Music Director James Levine conducts. Performance date: January 11, 1986.

Wagner’s Romantic opera demands singing actors who can truly inhabit their parts, and that’s just what we have here. Is it possible for a Knight of the Holy Grail to look more enticing than Peter Hofmann? No wonder Elsa (Eva Marton) falls in love at first sight. Marton’s heroine is innocent, but she is also a passionate, real-life young woman—which is good, because Leonie Rysanek is positively demented as Ortrud, the sorceress who accuses Elsa and Lohengrin of using magic. With James Levine’s superb conducting, the orchestra and chorus are similarly magical. Performance date: January 10, 1986.

With James Levine’s masterful conducting, Mozart’s sublime score works its colorful magic in this upstairs/downstairs drama. Ruggero Raimondi (Figaro) and Kathleen Battle (Susannah) are the servants, caught up in the ongoing domestic drama of the Count and Countess (Thomas Allen and Carol Vaness). Only all is not what it seems, and the battle lines keep shifting in the most unexpected ways. Frederica von Stade is Cherubino, the young page body who’s in love with love and who keeps complicating everyone’s best laid plans at exactly the wrong times. Performance date: December 14, 1985.