The new staging of Camille Saint-Saëns' opera Samson et Dalila opened in September 2018-19 in The Metropolitan Opera. On October 20th it will be screened in cinemas around the world in the broadcast series "The Met: Live in HD". The transmission at the Warsaw Cinema "Praha" will take place at 6:35 pm.
When mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča and tenor Roberto Alagna joined forces for a new production of Carmen at the Met, the results were electrifying. Now this star duo reunites for another sensual French opera when they open the season in the title roles of Saint-Saëns’s biblical epic Samson et Dalila. Darko Tresnjak, who won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2014 for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, makes his Met debut directing a vivid, seductive staging, featuring a monumental setting for the last-act Temple of Dagon, where the hero crushes his Philistine enemies. Sir Mark Elder conducts the first new Met production of the work in 20 years.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a leading figure of the French musical world throughout his life, successful as an organist, pianist, conductor, and prominent music commentator in addition to his work as a composer. Ferdinand Lemaire (1832–1879), a poet who married a cousin of Saint-Saëns’s and who made his most lasting impression with this work, contributed the libretto. The score of this opera teems over with color and dramatic aptitude and is a worthy compendium of Saint-Saëns’s diversified genius. Portions of the opera, including Dalila’s seduction aria “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” and the extraordinary ballet sequence in the final scene—the Bacchanale—are known well beyond the opera house. Throughout the work, the score brilliantly animates all the powerful and diverse colors in the iconic story, from the lurid to the exotic, the crass, the sensual, and even the sublimely spiritual.
The performance in the original language (French) with Polish subtitles will take about 3 hours. The list of places in Poland where you can watch broadcasts from The Metropolitan Opera is available here.
Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.
More information at: http://www.kinopraha.pl
