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Soprano Angel Blue makes her long-awaited Met role debut as the Ethiopian princess torn between love and country, one of opera’s defining roles. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium for the New Year’s Eve premiere of Michael Mayer’s spectacular new staging, which brings audiences inside the towering pyramids and gilded tombs of ancient Egypt with intricate projections and dazzling animations. Mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi, following her 2024 debut in Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, is Aida’s Egyptian rival Amneris, sharing the role with Elīna Garanča, who returns to the Met for the first time since 2020. Leading tenors Piotr Beczała and Brian Jagde alternate as the soldier Radamès, who completes the greatest love triangle in the repertory. The all-star cast also features baritones Quinn Kelsey and Amartuvshin Enkhbat and bass-baritone Eric Owens as Amonasro and basses Dmitry Belosselskiy, Alexander Vinogradov, and Morris Robinson as Ramfis. Christina Nilsson makes her Met debut in the title role in March, and Alexander Soddy shares conducting duties.

Following the haunting Met premiere of his first opera, Dead Man Walking, composer Jake Heggie returns to the company with his 2010 adaptation of Herman Melville’s sea-drenched, heaven-storming epic. A cast of standouts comes together on the decks of the Pequod, with tenor Brandon Jovanovich starring as the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, implacable in his pursuit of the white whale; tenor Stephen Costello as Greenhorn, the opera’s version of Ishmael; baritone Peter Mattei as the even-keeled first mate Starbuck; and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg. The cast also features soprano Janai Brugger as Pip, tenor William Burden as Flask, and baritone Malcolm MacKenzie as Stubb. Maestro Karen Kamensek takes the podium for a stunning staging by Leonard Foglia that arrives at the Met newly enlarged and refined following acclaimed runs in Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

Following a string of awe-inspiring Met performances, soprano Lise Davidsen stars as Leonore, who risks everything to save her husband from the clutches of tyranny. Tenor David Butt Philip is the political prisoner Florestan, sharing the stage with bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny as the villainous Don Pizarro, veteran bass René Pape as the jailer Rocco, and soprano Ying Fang and tenor Magnus Dietrich, in his company debut, as the young Marzelline and Jaquino. Bass Stephen Milling sings the principled Don Fernando, and Susanna Mälkki conducts the Met’s striking production, which finds modern-day parallels in Beethoven’s stirring paean to freedom.

Conductor Joana Mallwitz makes her Met debut leading two extraordinary casts in Mozart’s comic masterpiece. Bass-baritones Michael Sumuel and Luca Pisaroni star as the clever valet Figaro, opposite sopranos Olga Kulchynska and Rosa Feola as his betrothed, the wily maid Susanna. Baritone Joshua Hopkins and bass-baritone Adam Plachetka alternate as the skirt-chasing Count, sopranos Federica Lombardi and Jacquelyn Stucker (in her Met debut) trade off as his anguished wife, and mezzo-sopranos Marianne Crebassa and Emily D’Angelo share the role of the adolescent page Cherubino.

Simon McBurney’s uproarious full-length German-language production of Mozart’s beloved fable—with its ingenious theatrical concoction of projections, puppetry, and special effects—returns to the Met stage following its celebrated 2023 premiere. Tenor Ben Bliss and soprano Golda Schultz are the noble lovers Tamino and Pamina, and baritone Thomas Oliemans repeats his animated portrayal of the outlandish bird catcher Papageno. Soprano Kathryn Lewek reprises her hair-raising turn as the Queen of the Night, Stephen Milling is the priest Sarastro, and Evan Rogister conducts.

Rossini’s effervescent comedy retakes the stage in Bartlett Sher’s madcap production. Two star mezzo-sopranos—Isabel Leonard and Aigul Akhmetshina—headline a winning ensemble as the feisty heroine, Rosina, alongside high-flying tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Jack Swanson, in his Met debut, as her secret beloved, Count Almaviva. Baritones Davide Luciano and Andrey Zhilikhovsky star as Figaro, the infamous barber of Seville, with baritone Nicola Alaimo and bass-baritone Peter Kálmán as Dr. Bartolo and bass Alexander Vinogradov as Don Basilio rounding out the principal cast. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts.

The Met’s Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition is a nationwide program designed to discover promising young opera singers and assist in their artistic and professional development. Each season, more than 1,300 applicants participate in a series of auditions leading up to the Grand Finals Concert—featuring the Met Orchestra—in which a small group of finalists compete for cash prizes and the chance to launch a major operatic career. Since the program’s inauguration more than 70 years ago, the competition has discovered generations of star singers, including Jessye Norman, Frederica von Stade, Renée Fleming, Denyce Graves, Stephanie Blythe, Sondra Radvanovsky, Lawrence Brownlee, Lisette Oropesa, Jamie Barton, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Nadine Sierra, and Ryan Speedo Green.

Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts his first Met performances of Strauss’s white-hot one-act tragedy, which receives its first new production at the company in 20 years. Claus Guth, one of Europe’s leading opera directors, gives the biblical story—already filtered through the beautiful and strange imagination of Oscar Wilde’s play—a psychologically perceptive Victorian-era setting rich in symbolism and subtle shades of darkness and light. Headlining the new staging is soprano Elza van den Heever as the abused and unhinged antiheroine, who demands the head of Jochanaan, sung by celebrated baritone Peter Mattei. Tenor Gerhard Siegel is Salome’s lecherous stepfather, King Herod, with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung as his wife, Herodias, and tenor Piotr Buszewski as Narraboth. Derrick Inouye conducts two performances in May.

The most recent opera by preeminent American composer John Adams—a glorious adaptation of Shakespeare’s immortal drama—has its Met premiere. Following her debut in the company premiere of Adams’s El Niño in 2024, soprano Julia Bullock stars as the irresistible Cleopatra, one of theater’s most complex and captivating characters, opposite bass-baritone Gerald Finley as the conflicted Antony. Adams himself takes the podium to conduct his lyrical and richly orchestrated score, leading a new staging by groundbreaking director Elkhanah Pulitzer that transports the story of troubled romance and political strife from ancient Rome to the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. Tenor Paul Appleby is Caesar, who goes to war with Antony, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong is Caesar’s sister and Antony’s forsaken wife Octavia.