After Armida with Renée Fleming in 2011 and Lucia di Lammermoor with stage direction by Simon Stone in 2022, I’ll be conducting La Sonnambula, with stage direction entrusted to the artistic versatility of Rolando Villazón. I have an outstanding cast, with Nadine Sierra and Xabier Anduaga singing for the first time at the Met as Amina and Alvino. Being able to count on two supreme Belcanto singers and such an exceptional cast is today essential for staging La Sonnambula, an opera “of” and “for” singers, ever since Giuditta Pasta and Giovanni Battista Rubini led it to success when it premiered in Milan on 6th March 1831 at the Teatro Carcano. We all know how complex it is to stage and conduct an opera like La Sonnambula, because of its minimal theatricality, sheltered as it is in a kind of nineteenth century Arcadia. Yet, if La Sonnambula is one of Bellini’s best-loved operas, this is not only thanks to its enchanting arias but also to the modernity of a female character who is prone to sleepwalking, a typically nineteenth-century condition, an authentic (or artistic) refuge in a world very different from the brutal, violent one of real life at the time. I’m looking forward once again to the challenge of bringing emotional depth to Bellini’s orchestration, having conducted the first ever performance of this production at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 2021, broadcast to a vast audience by Radio France. Now, as then, our performance on 18th October will be broadcast live at hundreds of cinemas worldwide.
