Met Live Offers Double-Billing of Two Very Different Fairy Tales for Valentine's Day

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Nadja Michael stars as Judith alongside Mikhail Petrenko as Bluebeard in Bartók's “Duke Bluebeard's Castle,” screening on The Met: Live in HD on Saturday, Feb. 14.

• From left, Piotr Beczala as Vaudémont and Anna Netrebko as the title character in Tchaikovsky's “Iolanta,” for The Met: Live in HD.
• A scene from Tchaikovsky's “Iolanta,” which will screen live in a Valentine’s Day double-billing from the Metropolitan Opera on Feb. 14 at the Roxy Theater.

POTSDAM, NY (02/04/2015)(readMedia)-- The Met: Live in HD will bring two very different fairy tales from stage to screen, in a Valentine's Day double billing of "Iolantha" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" by Béla Bartók.

The acclaimed Polish film director Mariusz Treli?ski leads this exciting new production inspired by classic noir films of the 1940s, to bring together two rarely performed one-act operas.

Tchaikovsky's enchanting fairy tale "Iolantha" stars Anna Netrebko as a blind princess undergoing an awakening, as she experiences love for the first time.

An erotic psychological thriller, "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" is another kind of love story altogether. Bartók's opera follows the classic folktale, in which a newlywed bride must open seven locked doors to discover the depth of her new husbands secrets. Nadja Michael plays the unwitting victim of the diabolical Bluebeard, performed by Mikhail Petrenko.

Bloomberg News praised the production, saying the operas were "thrillingly staged," with "superlative casts."

Tchaikovsky's "Iolantha" and Bartók's "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" will screen live from the Metropolitan Opera stage at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 14 at Potsdam's Roxy Theater. There will be an encore screening at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 22.

The operas will be performed in Russian and Hungarian, with English subtitles. The approximate running time is three hours, 40 minutes, including intermissions.

The 2014-15 season of The Met: Live in HD is sponsored in the North Country by SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music and J.S. Cinemas.

All productions will be shown live worldwide on Saturdays. There will also be encore presentations offered on Sundays locally. Doors open a half-hour before show time, and there is immediate seating for advance ticket holders.

In The Met: Live in HD, robotic cameras, strategically placed around and behind the stage, capture the beauty and power of live performance from striking angles, and heighten attention to both performance and production. Intermission features and English subtitles bring the stories to life.

Tickets prices are the lowest available in the nation: $18 for an adult, $15 for senior citizens, $12 for students and $9 for youth age 18 and under.

Tickets are available by calling the Community Performance Series Box Office at (315) 267-2277, visiting the CPS Box Office in the lobby of SUNY Potsdam's Performing Arts Center, or online at www.cpspotsdam.org. Tickets can also be purchased at the Roxy Theater immediately prior to the showing.

For more information on the 2014-15 The Met: Live in HD season, visit the Metropolitan Opera website at www.metopera.org/hdlive.

For more information about SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music, please visit www.potsdam.edu/crane.

Founded in 1886, SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music has a long legacy of excellence in music education and performance. Life at Crane includes an incredible array of more than 300 recitals, lectures and concerts presented by faculty, students and guests each year. The Crane School of Music is the State University of New York's only All-Steinway institution.

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