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The program was originally seen live in movie theaters on December 10 as part of the groundbreaking The Met: Live in HD series, which transmits live performances to more than 1700 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 54 countries around the world.

Great Performances at the Met is a presentation of THIRTEEN for WNET, one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local arts programming to the New York community.

Kaufmann makes his Met role debut as the title character, and Poplavskaya makes hers as Faust’s love interest and eventual victim, Marguerite; Pape returns to one of his greatest Met roles, the wicked tempter Méphistophélès. French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Michèle Losier makes her house role debut as the student Siébel and Russell Braun makes his in the role of Marguerite’s soldier brother, Valentin.

McAnuff is a Tony Award winner for Big River and The Who’s Tommy and the Artistic Director of Canada’s prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival. His production of Faust, a co-production with the English National Opera, where it premiered last season, sets the action in the mid-20^th century, with Faust as a nuclear scientist who sees the terrible effects of his life’s work and longs to return to a simpler time. The main part of the opera takes place in a flashback to an earlier part of the 20^th century, with the plot unfolding in the moments before Faust dies from drinking a fatal potion.

Gounod’s opera has been a staple of the Met’s repertory since 1883, when it was the first opera ever presented at the old Metropolitan Opera House.

When this production premiered last November, Associated Press enthused: “Exceptional work by a fine cast of singing actors led by tenor Jonas Kaufmann, soprano Marina Poplavskaya and bass René Pape…their performances, sharply directed by Des McAnuff, guaranteed that Gounod’s opera came across as serious and even gripping theater. And rarely has the score sounded more captivating than in the rhapsodic account by the Met orchestra under the guidance of the young conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.”

Nézet-Séguin, the Music Director Designate of the Philadelphia Orchestra, had two previous Met engagements: the new productions of Bizet’s Carmen (2009) and Verdi’s Don Carlo (2010), both broadcast on Great Performances at the Met. Kaufmann is currently one of the world’s most in-demand tenors, starring in a varied repertory that has included Met performances of Siegmund in Wagner’s Die Walküre (2011 new production), Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca, Don José in Carmen, Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata, and Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. In October, he became the first Met artist since Luciano Pavarotti (in 1984) to sing a solo recital from the Met stage, and this spring, he will reprise his Siegmund in complete Ring cycles.

Last season, Poplavskaya received critical praise for her singing and acting in two Met role debuts. She sang Elisabeth de Valois in the new production of Don Carlo, also seen on Great Performances at the Met, and she also starred as Violetta in Willy Decker’s staging of La Traviata. Pape, whose last Met engagement was as King Philip to Poplavskaya’s Elisabeth on the Japan tour, sang Méphistophélès in the Met’s 2004-05 season. Last season, he starred in the title role of a new production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (seen on Great Performances at the Met).

McAnuff’s design team for Faust includes two Tony nominees in their Met debuts: scenic designer Robert Brill and costume designer Paul Tazewell. Peter Mumford, whose work at the Met includes Madama Butterfly, Carmen, and Peter Grimes, designed the lighting for the production. Choreographer Kelly Devine and video designer Sean Nieuwenhuis also made their Met debuts with this production.

Mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato hosts. Barbara Willis Sweete directs the telecast.

Major funding for the telecast is provided by M. Beverly and Robert G. Bartner.  Corporate support for Great Performances at the Met is provided by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®. This Great Performances presentation is funded by the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation.

For the Met, Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are Supervising Producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are Producers. Peter Gelb is Executive Producer. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is Series Producer; David Horn is Executive Producer.

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Rodelinda also stars Andreas Scholl as the exiled king Bertarido and Stephanie Blythe as his sister Eduige. English countertenor Iestyn Davies makes his Met debut as Bertarido’s faithful friend Unulfo, and, in Met role debuts, Joseph Kaiser sings the usurper Grimoaldo and Shenyang the corrupt royal advisor Garibaldo.

The program was originally seen live in movie theaters on December 3 as part of the groundbreaking The Met: Live in HD series, which transmits live performances to more than 1700 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 54 countries around the world.

Great Performances at the Met is a presentation of THIRTEEN for WNET, one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local arts programming to the New York community.

Handel’s opera, based on the life of a seventh-century queen of Lombardy, premiered at the Met in 2004 with Fleming in the title role. The opera, in which Rodelinda’s love for her exiled husband remains steadfast despite the romantic and political machinations of his enemies, is a showcase for some of Handel’s most extraordinary arias and duets.

Bicket made his Met debut leading the new production premiere of Rodelinda in 2004, and has since conducted Met revivals of Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. He is also the director of The English Concert, a Baroque orchestra that uses period instruments and tours throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. Wadsworth, whose staging of the opera has been praised for its clarity and fluidity, has also directed new productions of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride at the Met, as well as a new staging of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, co-produced with The Juilliard School.

Rodelinda is the sole Baroque heroine in Fleming’s extensive Met repertory of twenty-one roles. Her recent Met performances include the Countess in the first-ever Met revival of Strauss’s Capriccio; the title character in the Met premiere of Rossini’s Armida; the Marschallin in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier; and the title characters in Massenet’s Thaïs and Dvořák’s Rusalka.

Blythe, like Fleming, starred in Rodelinda’s Met premiere and a subsequent revival in the 2005-06 season. Scholl made his Met debut as Bertarido in the 2006 revival of Rodelinda, and also starred in a high-profile 1998 Glyndebourne production of the opera, conducted by William Christie.

Davies is a prominent performer in recital and opera in his native England, specializing in the Baroque repertory. Kaiser co-starred with Fleming last season as Flamand in Strauss’s Capriccio. Shenyang has appeared at the Met as Colline in Puccini’s La Bohème and Masetto in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Soprano Deborah Voigt hosts. Matthew Diamond directs the telecast.

This Great Performances presentation is funded by the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation. Major support for the Rodelinda telecast is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Wilmer J. Thomas, Jr. Corporate support for Great Performances at the Met is provided by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®.

For the Met, Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are Supervising Producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are Producers. Peter Gelb is Executive Producer. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is Series Producer; David Horn is Executive Producer.

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The opera, which earned exceptional praise in its Met premiere, is based on Mahatma Gandhi’s early life in South Africa, where he developed the revolutionary philosophy of non-violent resistance that continues to be used in protests around the world. “Almost all the techniques of protest—now the common currency of contemporary political life—were invented and perfected by Gandhi during his South Africa years,” Glass has said.

The program was originally seen live in movie theaters on November 19 as part of the groundbreaking The Met: Live in HD series, which transmits live performances to more than 1700 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 54 countries around the world.

Great Performances at the Met is a presentation of THIRTEEN for WNET, one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local arts programming to the New York community.

McDermott and Crouch’s production uses a combination of large-scale puppetry, sets made of materials such as corrugated metal and newspaper, and projected supertitles to immerse the viewer in Glass’s poetic world. Conductor Dante Anzolini leads a cast that features Richard Croft, reprising his critically acclaimed interpretation of Gandhi.

Satyagraha is divided into three acts, each inspired by a major historical figure: the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, and the American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The plot of the opera follows Gandhi through his formative years as a young attorney in South Africa, where his firsthand experience of racial inequality inspired him to create the movement of non-violent resistance that would define his life and work. The Sanskrit libretto, by Glass and Constance DeJong, is taken from the Bhaghavad Gita. Croft is joined by two of the other leads of the Met premiere production, Rachelle Durkin as Miss Schlesen and Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji, and Kim Josephson in the role of Mr. Kallenbach.

The opera is the second part of Glass’s famous trilogy of operas about important historical figures, which also includes Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Akhnaten (1983). Satyagraha is the second Glass opera to be performed at the Met, following The Voyage, a Met commission that premiered in 1992.

Conductor Anzolini is a leading interpreter of Glass’s work; in addition to the Met premiere of this opera, he has conducted critically acclaimed performances of The White Raven in Lisbon and at the Lincoln Center Festival; Symphony No. 5 in Brussels and at the Kennedy Center; Akhnaten at Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg, France; and the European premiere of Symphony No. 8 with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz in Austria.

In addition to singing the central role of Gandhi in the Met premiere of Satyagraha, Croft has sung numerous roles at the Met, including Loge in the 2010 new production premiere of Das Rheingold, Cassio in Otello, Count Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Ferrando in Così fan tutte, and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. Durkin, a graduate of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, debuted in the Met premiere of Wolf-Ferrari’s Sly in 2002 and most recently sang Norina in Don Pasquale during the 2010-11 season. Walker’s Met repertory includes roles in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mktsensk, Ravel’s L’enfant et Les Sortilèges, and the Met premiere of Busoni’s Doktor Faust. Kim Josephson’s 244 performances with the Met have included the new production premieres of La Fanciulla del West, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Otello, Andrea Chénier, and Carmen, and the Met premieres of Strauss’s Capriccio and Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge.

Bass-baritone Eric Owens hosts. Barbara Willis Sweete directs the telecast.

Great Performances is funded by the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation. Corporate support for Great Performances at the Met is provided by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®.

For the Met, Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are Supervising Producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are Producers. Peter Gelb is Executive Producer. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is Series Producer; David Horn is Executive Producer.

Watch a preview:

The program was originally seen live in movie theaters on October 29, 2011 as part of the groundbreaking The Met: Live in HD series, which transmits live performances to more than 1700 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 54 countries around the world.

Great Performances at the Met is a presentation of THIRTEEN for WNET, one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local arts programming to the New York community.

The classic tale of lust, heartbreak, and revenge stars charismatic Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien in his first-ever Met performances of the notorious title character. For the first time with Don Giovanni at the Met, Luisi conducts the performance from a cembalo in the orchestra pit.

Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka and German soprano Mojca Erdmann make their Met debuts as two of Giovanni’s female conquests, Donna Anna and Zerlina, opposite distinguished Mozartean Barbara Frittoli as the fiery Donna Elvira. Tenor Ramón Vargas sings the role of Donna Anna’s fiancé, the nobleman Don Ottavio, and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni is Giovanni’s hapless manservant Leporello. Joshua Bloom sings the shepherd Masetto and Štefan Kocán is the vengeful Commendatore.

Grandage, the longtime artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse, won a 2010 Tony Award for directing John Logan’s drama Red. Last season, he directed new productions of Billy Budd at Glyndebourne and Madama Butterfly at Houston Grand Opera. His other Broadway credits include Peter Morgan’s docudrama Frost/Nixon, a 2009 staging of Hamlet starring Jude Law, and an upcoming revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita in spring 2012.

Grandage’s design team includes his longtime collaborator Christopher Oram (sets and costumes), also a recent Tony Award winner for Red; lighting designer Paule Constable, who also designed this season’s Anna Bolena and Satyagraha; and choreographer Ben Wright, whose credits include numerous operas and musicals in England and Scotland. Oram and Wright make their Met debuts with this production.

Luisi, who was elevated to the position of Principal Conductor in September, led performances of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro in the Met’s 2009-10 season and has a Met repertory that includes critically acclaimed performances of Verdi’s Don Carlo, Rigoletto, and Simon Boccanegra; Puccini’s La Bohème, Tosca, and Turandot; Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena (the 2007 new production premiere), Elektra, and Ariadne auf Naxos; Berg’s Lulu; and Wagner’s Das Rheingold. He is also conducting Wagner’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Massenet’s Manon, as well as a revival of Verdi’s La Traviata, all coming up on Great Performances at the Met.

Kwiecien has sung Don Giovanni at numerous international opera houses, including the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Munich State Opera; San Francisco Opera; Santa Fe Opera; and Warsaw Opera, earning praise for his accomplished vocalism and seductive interpretation. Don Giovanni is his fourth leading role in a new production at the Met, following his performances as Dr. Malatesta in Don Pasquale (2006), and Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor (2007), all seen on Great Performances at the Met, as well as Escamillo in Carmen (2009).

Rebeka sang the role of Donna Anna last season at the Deutsche Oper Berlin under the baton of Roberto Abbado. Fellow debuting artist Erdmann sang Zerlina at the 2011 Baden-Baden Festival in a production conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Frittoli last sang Donna Elvira at the Met in the 2008-09 season.

Vargas makes his Met role debut as Don Ottavio, a role he last performed in Covent Garden’s 2008-09 season. Bloom made his Met debut as Masetto in the 2008-09 season. Slovakian bass Kocán will make his Met role debut as the Commendatore.

Renée Fleming hosts. Barbara Willis Sweete directs the telecast.

Great Performances is funded by Vivian Milstein, the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, and Annaliese Soros. Corporate support for Great Performances at the Met is provided by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®.

For the Met, Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are Supervising Producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are Producers. Peter Gelb is Executive Producer. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is Series Producer; David Horn is Executive Producer.

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The opera, a compelling dramatization of the tragic final days of Anne Boleyn—whose husband Henry VIII spurns her and has her sentenced to death—is directed by David McVicar and conducted by Marco Armiliato. The cast includes Russian mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova as Anna’s romantic rival, Giovanna (Jane Seymour); Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov as the cruel Enrico (Henry VIII); American tenor Stephen Costello as Anna’s first love, Lord Percy; and American mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford as the queen’s devoted page Smeton.

Great Performances at the Met is a presentation of THIRTEEN for WNET, one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers. For more than 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local arts programming to the New York community.

The telecast was originally seen live in movie theaters on October 15 as part of the groundbreaking series, The Met: Live in HD, which transmits live performances to more than 1600 movie theaters and performing arts centers in 54 countries around the world.

Generally considered one of Donizetti’s finest operas, Anna Bolena is the first in a trilogy of works based on the lives of Tudor-era queens that David McVicar will direct at the Met over the next few seasons (the other two are Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux). McVicar, whose production of Il Trovatore aired on Great Performances at the Met in August, has created a historically detailed setting for the opera, which re-emerged as a musical and dramatic showpiece for extraordinary sopranos when Maria Callas starred in a famous 1957 La Scala revival of the work.

“Donizetti takes the bel canto form and explores every possible dramatic opportunity within it,” McVicar says. “The lynchpin of the story is Anna Bolena’s inability to provide Henry VIII with the male heir that he craves. And, of course, to be a wife of Henry VIII is to risk as much as you gain.”

She made her Met debut in 2002 as Natasha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace. Since then, Netrebko has sung nine additional roles with the company, including Donizetti’s Norina in Don Pasquale and Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor. This spring, she will return to the Met as the hedonistic heroine of Massenet’s Manon in her second new production of the season, also to be broadcast on Great Performances at the Met.

Gubanova made her Met debut in a 2007 revival of War and Peace and starred as Giulietta opposite Netrebko’s Antonia in Bartlett Sher’s 2009 new production premiere of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. At the Met, Abdrazakov has starred in the title role in the company premiere of Verdi’s Attila, as Méphistophélès in both Gounod’s Faust and Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, and as Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Rising young tenor Costello made his Met debut as Arturo, Lucia’s doomed husband, in the new production of Lucia di Lammermoor that opened the 2007-08 season. He sang the role of Percy at the Dallas Opera in the 2010-11 season.

The design team for Anna Bolena includes two artists making their Met debuts. Scenic designer Robert Jones collaborated with McVicar on the acclaimed 2005 Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare and has designed numerous plays and musicals, including the Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and the 2002 revival of Noises Off. Olivier Award-winning costume designer Jenny Tiramani, a leading authority on historical costuming, has designed for numerous theater productions and spent eight years as Head of Design at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Paule Constable, whose Met credits include the company premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha and this season’s new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, is the lighting designer for Anna Bolena. Her numerous honors include a 2011 Tony Award for her work on Broadway’s War Horse.

This production of Anna Bolena was made possible by a generous gift from Mercedes and Sid R. Bass.

Renée Fleming, who will star in Handel’s Rodelinda later this year on Great Performances at the Met, hosts. Gary Halvorson directs the telecast.

Great Performances is funded by Vivian Milstein, the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, and Annaliese Soros. Corporate support for Great Performances at the Met is provided by Toll Brothers, America’s luxury home builder®.

For the Met, Mia Bongiovanni and Elena Park are Supervising Producers, and Louisa Briccetti and Victoria Warivonchik are Producers. Peter Gelb is Executive Producer. For Great Performances, Bill O’Donnell is Series Producer; David Horn is Executive Producer.