Gen HD

For generations of singers, the Met’s Saturday Matinee Radio Broadcasts provided the first spark of passion for opera, starting them on a path to future stardom. Now, after nearly 20 years of the company’s Live in HD series, a new wave of stars has arrived whose early taste of opera on the big screen, not the airwaves, proved pivotal. By Christopher Browner

Seventeen-year-old Aigul Akhmetshina sat in a movie theater 5,200 miles from New York City and imagined an improbable future. It was March 2014, and Akhmetshina was in the western Russian city of Ufa taking in the Met’s HD transmission of Massenet’s Werther, featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann. “I just fell in love with the opera,” says the now–28-year-old star, “and ever since, I dreamt that I would get the chance to sing Charlotte.” Over the course of her musical studies and into her time in the young artist program at London’s Royal Opera House, the mezzo-soprano continued to attend Met cinema transmissions, seeing nearly 35 broadcasts. Her dream of starring in Werther came true last summer, when she sang her first Charlotte in London—opposite Kaufmann in the title role. And some six months after that, she made her own Live in HD debut, headlining the Met’s new production of Bizet’s Carmen (pictured below) to rave reviews.

For 12-year-old Emily D’Angelo in Ontario, Canada, it was a 2007 Live in HD performance of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia that did the trick. Having heard snatches of opera around the house, it wasn’t until her grandparents brought her to the cinema transmission that all the pieces fell into place. “To see a full performance with closeups was really memorable,” she says. “It was amazing, and yet it also seemed natural, like we were just watching a film.” Three time zones away at California’s Chapman University, tenor Ben Bliss—who stars alongside D’Angelo (pictured below) in the October 19 transmission of Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded—was in a movie theater watching the very same performance. And while he was in awe of Juan Diego Flórez’s high-flying take on Count Almaviva, it was Joyce DiDonato’s intermission interview that left the greater impact. “When she said that she was from Prairie Village, Kansas, I just about fell out of my chair,” he says. “That’s the exact same tiny suburb of Kansas City that I’m from. That just blew my mind—nobody’s from Prairie Village!”

By the time soprano Nadine Sierra (pictured at top) saw her first Live in HD transmission—a 2009 performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor—she was already an extremely promising talent and was shortly to become the youngest-ever winner of the Met’s National Council Auditions. Right away, she knew that the series represented a major step forward for the art form. “It was so different from the Met telecasts I had seen when I was growing up. With the high-definition filming, not to mention the interviews and backstage footage, I could see that opera was really broadening its reach to new audiences,” she says. Fast forward 15 years, and Sierra has starred in four cinema transmissions, including a Lucia of her own in 2022, and served as host for five more. And even as a major star, she’s still an occasional audience member, making a point in 2019 to attend a repeat screening of Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. “I actually hosted that show, and before leading the interviews, I was in the house to hear Javier Camarena encore the nine high Cs in ‘Ah! Mes amis,’” she says. “It was so astounding that I wanted to witness the moment again.”

Akhmetshina—who returns to the silver screen this season as Rosina in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia— says that, as a developing singer, the Live in HD series became her unofficial textbook. Not only could she expand her knowledge of the operatic canon, but the exposure to a wide variety of artists helped her define her own approach to singing. “The first lesson for young singers is that there is no one recipe,” she says. “To see all these amazing artists, and everyone singing differently, helped me to embrace my own unique voice. And the closeups helped me to understand what they were doing on a technical level. I tried to feel it in my body.”

Both Sierra and Bliss (pictured above) will return to host transmissions in the coming season—Grounded and Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann on October 5, respectively—and Akhmetshina will make her hosting debut with the spring presentation of Strauss’s Salome. While it’s an opportunity she’s looking forward to, she’s even more eager to show her lighter side to cinema audiences in Barbiere after last season’s intense outing as Carmen. “I love to transform into different characters, and I’m so glad that I will have the chance to show that I can also play comedy,” she says. “I think opera is still relevant because we can recognize ourselves in it. We all make mistakes, and comedies allow us to laugh at the situation and find some joy. I’m really excited to share that with audiences all around the world.”

Christopher Browner is the Met’s Senior Editor.