The Met Opera will present a live-streamed gala with 40+ artists
Photo via Wikimedia
The show must go on. The Metropolitan Opera on Monday announced plans to host a virtual “At-Home Gala” this month with over 40 artists participating around the world. On Saturday, April 25 at 1 p.m., leading Met artists will perform live from their homes for a free three-hour concert. The event comes after the venue was forced to cancel the rest of its season because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Peter Gelb, the general manager for the Met, will be producing the event from his Upper West Side apartment alongside music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, from his home in Montreal.
“While the Met is famous for its high-definition transmissions into cinemas, this will be a great artistic but low-tech operation, Gelb said in a press release. “We will be providing operatic uplift to our audiences, as well as for our singers, who are eager to connect with their fans.”
With an expected loss of $60 million due to the COVID-19 forced closure, the virtual gala is part of an urgent fundraising campaign, “The Voice Must Be Heard,” that aims to support the company in the future.
The gala will start at 1 p.m., the time of the Met’s regularly scheduled Saturday matinee performances, on the Met website. The program will be available to view until 6:30 p.m. the following day. Featured artists hail everywhere from New York and New Jersey to Latvia and South Africa. See the line-up here.
The Met is also offering free virtual performances every night of the week. Streams go live on its website each night at 7:30 p.m. and remain up until 6:30 p.m. the next day. “We’d like to provide some grand opera solace to opera lovers in these extraordinarily difficult times,” Gelb said. “Every night, we’ll be offering a different complete operatic gem from our collection of HD presentations from the past 14 years.” More details on this week’s screenings can be found here.
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