Great Performances : Season 43

Stage and screen legend Julie Andrews returns for the sixth time to host the festive annual New Year’s celebration with the Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Zubin Mehta, from Vienna’s Musikverein.

This star-studded, 90-minute performance documentary offers an overview of the Kennedy Center’s American Voices festival, which was created and hosted by Renée Fleming in November of 2013. Follow vocal masters, industry titans, and emerging artists as they explore and debate the legacy and future of American singing. Singers include Fleming, Eric Owens, Dianne Reeves, Alison Krauss and more.

Mozart’s elegant masterpiece of marital discord, Le Nozze di Figaro, conducted by Met Music Director James Levine and staged by Richard Eyre. Ildar Abdrazakov sings the title role, Marlis Petersen plays Figaro’s quick-witted bride-to-be, Susanna, and Peter Mattei is Count Almaviva.

Following a London West End run in December 2007, a sold-out limited engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March 2008, and an eight-week run on Broadway, director Rupert Goold's stage production of Macbeth was filmed for television at the end of 2009 with Patrick Stewart in his Tony-nominated performance as the ambitious general, and Tony-nominated Kate Fleetwood as his scheming wife.

Acclaimed director Richard Eyre’s production of Carmen stars Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili in the title role of the seductive gypsy, a part she has sung to acclaim at many of the world’s leading opera houses. Aleksandrs Antonenko sings the obsessed soldier Don José. Pablo Heras-Casado conducts.

Conducted by Music Director Alan Gilbert, selections include music by Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Luis Bacalov, performed by the New York Philharmonic and featuring Joshua Bell, Renée Fleming and Josh Groban. The concert includes video projection with animated graphics and film clips related to the films La Dolce Vita, Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in the West, Il Postino and more.

Choreographer Mark Morris' 1988 dance piece set to Handel's ``L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato'' is performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group July 2014 at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Spain. Hosted by Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The popular performer from the 80s and 90s performs songs from his 3-decade long career before an enthusiastic crowd in Toronto.

The concert of her Grammy-nominated album features Lennox’s takes on iconic American compositions by such artists as Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as she pays tribute to some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, interpreting compositions that have moved her, stripping them down to their emotional and musical core and making them her own.

James Levine leads Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Master-Singer of Nuremberg”) in its first Great Performances at the Met broadcast. Michael Volle is the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, starring with Johan Botha as Walther, Annette Dasch as Eva, Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser, Hans-Peter König as Pogner, Paul Appleby as David, and Karen Cargill as Magdalene. Renée Fleming hosts.

Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo stars as the tortured poet unlucky in love in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann on Great Performances at the Met. Offenbach based the opera on three stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The production is by Broadway director Bartlett Sher. Soprano Deborah Voigt hosts the broadcast.

The start of BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons’ tenure with the orchestra features two of the conductor’s close colleagues: his wife, the acclaimed Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais, and the outstanding German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, each singing selections from the Wagnerian and Italian verismo repertoires. The inaugural concert was filmed in September 2014.

The lavish new staging of Lehár’s effervescent operetta The Merry Widow is the Met debut of Broadway director and choreographer Susan Stroman. Soprano Renée Fleming adds a new character to her Met repertory as Hanna, the rich widow. Sir Andrew Davis conducts the cast that also includes baritone Nathan Gunn as Danilo; tenor Alek Shrader; baritone Sir Thomas Allen; and Broadway star Kelli O’Hara.

Polish film director Mariusz Treli?ski makes his Met debut with the new production, inspired by noir films of the 1940s. Valery Gergiev conducts the two rarely performed one-acts: Tchaikovsky’s lyrical fairy tale Iolanta and Bartók’s harrowing Bluebeard’s Castle. Iolanta stars Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczala and Aleksei Markov. Bluebeard's Castle stars Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko.

James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury reprise the play about an elderly Southern white woman and her black chauffeur in mid-twentieth century Atlanta, GA.

Itzhak Perlman is the special guest in a gala opening night concert paying tribute to the prolific film composer. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel conducts and Natalie Portman hosts.

Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez headline Rossini’s bel canto tour-de-force "La Donna del Lago" on Great Performances at the Met. Based on the work by Sir Walter Scott, DiDonato is Elena, the lady of the lake pursued by two men, with Flórez as Giacomo, the benevolent king of Scotland. Michele Mariotti conducts debuting Scottish director Paul Curran’s staging.