The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: The new “Met Live in HD” season opens this Saturday afternoon with an acclaimed performance by Anna Netrebko in Verdi’s “Macbeth.” Plus, the UW-Madison six-day brass festival opens tonight.

ALERT: The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music’s brass festival, “Celebrate Brass,” starts TONIGHT at 7:30 p.m. in Mills Hall with the UW-Madison Wisconsin Brass Quintet and composer Anthony Plog. It runs through next Monday. All events and concert except the big one on this Saturday night — are FREE and open to the public.

Here is a link to a previous story about it:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/classical-music-education-an-impressive-and-long-overdue-brass-festival-celebrate-brass-will-be-held-at-the-uw-madison-school-of-music-it-opens-next-wednesday-oct/

And here is a link to a complete schedule of the festival:

http://www.music.wisc.edu/brass-festival/

By Jacob Stockinger

Recently, the famed Metropolitan Opera (below) in New York City had to weather some pretty severe turbulence –- labor strife that threatened to close down the Met and delay the opening of its season.

But general director Peter Gelb (bel0w) and his negotiators reached an agreement with several labor unions, and everything remains on schedule.

That means the new season of “Met Live in HD” will open this Saturday with the acclaimed production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Macbeth” that features soprano Anna Netrebko in a major role that is unusually and unexpectedly dramatic for her. The conductor is Fabio Luisi.

That successful production should be very good news. The “MET Live in HD” program in seen in hundreds of cities around the world, and is one of the big moneymakers for the Met.

Main showings in Madison are this Saturday at 11:55 a.m. at the Point Cinemas on Madison’s far west side and the Eastgate Cinema on the city’s far east side. Running time is about 3-1/2 hours.

Admission is $24 for adults, $18 for children.

Encore showing are usually at 6:30 pm. on the following Wednesday and cost $18.

Here is some background including a review by New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini and a profile of Anna Netrebko  (below), who can be heard singing an aria from the same opera, in a different production with conductor Valery Gergiev in Russia, at the bottom in a YouTube video.

Here is the link to the review by Anthony Tommasini:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/arts/music/in-the-mets-macbeth-anna-netrebko-as-the-scheming-wife.html?_r=0

And here is the feature about diva Anna Netrebko:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/arts/after-anna-netrebkos-macbeth-triumph-norma-is-next.html

Want to know more about the Met’s HD season so you can plan?

Here is a link to see other information, including the entire season’s offering with dates, times, artist biographies, audio-video clips, synopses and program notes.

The season features lots of standards, including Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” and Jacques Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” “Carmen,” and some unusual works by Peter Tchaikovsky and Bela Bartok:

http://www.metopera.org/metopera/liveinhd/live-in-hd-2014-15-season