Kathryn Lewek

At Salzburg Festival, Cecilia Bartoli shines as Ariodante with her dazzling coloratura in a highly acclaimed new production by the German director Christoph Loy, who is known for his clever psychological stagings. Loy turns Handel's splendid baroque opera into an exciting and differentiated reflection on gender roles.

Set in Venice during the Renaissance, the drama centres on Bassanio, a young nobleman who would like to court the beautiful Portia but doesn‘t have the money to travel to her country estate, so he asks the merchant Antonio for help. Antonio‘s wealth is tied up in maritime trade but he offers to procure the sum Bassanio needs from the Jewish money lender Shylock. Shylock hates Antonio for being so contemptuous in his treatment of Jews, and therefore stipulates that if the debt is not repaid within three months, the penalty will be a pound of Antonio‘s own flesh...

Les Contes d’Hoffmann opera intertwines reality and fantasy, exploring the relationship between art and real life in Mariame Clément’s staging, with Marc Minkowski bringing the score to life.

The Queen of the Night enlists a handsome prince named Tamino to rescue her beautiful kidnapped daughter, Princess Pamina. Aided by the lovelorn bird hunter Papageno and a magical flute that holds the power to change the hearts of men, young Tamino embarks on a quest for true love, leading to the evil Sarastro's temple where Pamina is held captive.

Met Music Director Emeritus James Levine conducts Tony Award winner Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s masterpiece, Die Zauberflöte. Golda Schultz makes her Met debut as Pamina with Kathryn Lewek as the Queen of the Night. The holiday presentation of The Magic Flute, an abridged staging sung in English for families, was the first Live in HD performance to be transmitted. This is the first time the full-length German opera will be seen in the series.

Julie Taymor’s kaleidoscopic production returns to select cinemas this holiday season in an encore presentation of the company’s first-ever Live in HD transmission that includes tenor Matthew Polenzani, baritone Nathan Gunn, and bass René Pape in this abridged, English-language version of Mozart’s classic fable.

Offenbach’s mockery of bourgeois ideals, the sublimity of music and the institution of marriage ensures that the moralistic sermonizing of ‘Public Opinion’ falls on deaf ears. The mysterious figure of John Styx tells the story of behind-the-times Orpheus and his hacked-off Eurydice, of gods and goddesses seeking diversion, jaded with humdrum life in Olympus. He tells of the rebellion in the pantheon, which Jupiter adeptly averts by promising an amusement for his entourage. Burning with curiosity to see the beauteous captive and the contest between Jupiter and Pluto for Eurydice’s favour, the illustrious company embarks on an infernal ride to the underworld that culminates in what is surely the most wellknown can-can in the history of music. And what of Eurydice? She ends up putting a spoke in everyone’s wheel…

Production of the Salzuberger Festspiele 2024. French director Mariame Clément will explore the relationship between art and real life by linking the three “tales” with individual stages of Hoffmann's biography as an artist in her production. This has decisive consequences for the female characters, or rather for the view of the images that Hoffmann projects onto Stella: the angelic but emotionally cold Olympia, who turns out to be a doll;