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Renée Fleming on PBS

Great Performances at the Met: Elektra (Strauss) Sunday, September 18, 12 p.m. on PBS

Renée Fleming hosts Strauss’ blazing tragedy about an ancient Greek princess hell-bent on revenge, coming to the Met in the final production by the legendary director Patrice Chéreau, who died in 2014. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who made a riveting Met debut leading Chéreau’s production of Janáek’s From the House of the Dead in 2009, returns to conduct an extraordinary cast headed by Nina Stemme as the obsessed and bloodthirsty title character. Waltraud Meier sings her first Met performances of Klytämnestra, Elektra’s mother and the object of her fury, with Adrianne Pieczonka as Elektra’s sister, Chrysothemis; Eric Owens as her exiled brother, Orest; and German Burkhard Ulrich, in his Met debut, as the corrupt monarch Aegisth. Chéreau’s longtime collaborator Vincent Huguet will stage the production at the Met.

COMING IN 2017

Great Performances at the Met: Der Rosenkavalier (Strauss)

The dream cast of Renée Fleming as the Marschallin and Elna Garana as Octavian star in Strauss’ grandest opera. In his new production, Robert Carsen, the director behind the Met’s recent Falstaff, places the action at the end of the Habsburg Empire, underscoring the opera’s subtext of class and conflict against a rich backdrop of gilt and red damask, in a staging that also stars Günther Groissböck as Baron Ochs. Sebastian Weigle conducts the sparklingly perfect score.

Great Performances: from

In December 2015, Lyric Opera of Chicago premiered an opera adaptation of Ann Patchett’s best-selling novel Bel Canto, a gripping contemporary story inspired by the 1996 Japanese Embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru. Curated by Renée Fleming, Lyric’s creative consultant, the production features a score by the remarkable young Peruvian composer Jimmy López and a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, and dramatizes the tensions and unexpected alliances that form between the terrorists and their hostages. Australian-born American Danielle de Niese portrays the story’s central figure, the fictional soprano Roxanne Coss, under the baton of Lyric music director Sir Andrew Davis, with direction by Kevin Newbury.

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