The Met to Perform Verdi's REQUIEM This Moth Led by Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin

The Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will conduct Verdi’s Requiem for three performances only, on September 27, 29, and 30. One of the repertory’s great showcases of vocal, choral, and orchestral writing, the Requiem features the Met Orchestra and Chorus and a quartet of accomplished soloists—soprano Leah Hawkins, mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, tenor Matthew Polenzani, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy.

Verdi’s Requiem has been performed at the Met more than 50 times, beginning on February 17, 1901, when it commemorated the composer’s death earlier that year. Since then, it has also been presented during historic moments, including in memory of John F. Kennedy on March 27 and 28, 1964; in honor of the late Luciano Pavarotti on September 18, 2009; and to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2021, led by Maestro Nézet-Séguin.

A native of Philadelphia and a graduate of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, soprano Leah Hawkins is also scheduled to sing the roles of Louise and Betty in the Met premiere of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X this November. Hawkins’s highlights and accomplishments include being the 2023 Marian Anderson Award recipient, presenting a recital at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, singing the soprano solo in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Nézet-Séguin, and performing Verdi’s Requiem with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel.

Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill was recently nominated for a Grammy Award as part of the cast of the Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. She was also the winner of the 2002 Kathleen Ferrier Award and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Famed for her interpretations of Wagner roles, she made her Met debut as Waltraute in Götterdämmerung in 2012 and regularly sings Erda in Das Rheingold and Siegfried, Fricka in Das Rheingold, Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde, and Magdalena in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Other operatic roles include Geneviève in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Judith in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Dryade in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Anna in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, and Dido in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

In addition to the Requiem, American tenor Matthew Polenzani is scheduled to perform the roles of Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème (October 10–November 4) and Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (January 11–March 14) at the Met this season. He has sung more than 400 performances of 43 roles with the company since his debut in 1997 and opened last season as Giasone in Cherubini’s rarely performed masterpiece Medea, opposite soprano Sondra Radvanovsky. Notable Met roles include Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth, the Italian Singer in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Tito in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Hoffmann in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, the Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Nadir in Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles, and the title characters of Verdi’s Don Carlos, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux.

Ukrainian bass Dmitry Belosselskiy also appears in Verdi’s Nabucco at the Met this season (September 28–January 26) as the high priest Zaccaria, the role in which he made his Met debut in 2011. Elsewhere, he has performed at the world’s finest opera houses and concert venues, including the Paris Opera, La Scala, Bavarian State Opera, Staatsoper Berlin, Bayreuth Festival, Opernhaus Zürich, Madrid’s Teatro Real, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Washington National Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Requiem Radio Broadcasts

The September 27 performance of Verdi’s Requiem will be broadcast live on Metropolitan Opera Radio SiriusXM Channel 355 and streamed live on the Met’s website,metopera.org. Audio from the performance will be broadcast over the Robert K. Johnson Foundation–Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network on March 30, 2024.

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