Saturday, December 13, 2025 | 1 PM | General Admission
Pre-Opera Conversation with Don Marrazzo | 12:30 PM
Umberto Giordano’s passionate tragedy stars tenor Piotr Beczała as the virtuous poet who falls victim to the intrigue and violence of the French Revolution.
Following their celebrated recent partnership in Giordano’s Fedora in the 2022-23 Live in HD season, Beczała reunites with soprano Sonya Yoncheva as Chénier’s aristocratic lover, Maddalena di Coigny, with baritone Igor Golovatenko as Carlo Gérard, the agent of the Reign of Terror who seals their fates. Met Principal Guest Conductor Daniele Rustioni takes the podium to lead Nicolas Joël’s gripping staging.
The Met: Live in HD is the Metropolitan Opera’s Peabody and Emmy Award–winning series of opera performances transmitted live from the stage of the Met in New York into movie theaters and event spaces worldwide. The series has made the Met the world’s leading provider of alternative cinema content and the only arts institution with an ongoing global series of this scale. When the series launched in 2006, the Met was the first arts company to experiment this way. Since then, the program has expanded, with more than 32 million tickets sold to date, and has been seen in virtually every important world capital from Paris to Cairo, as well as in towns and villages spread across six continents.
SUNY Fredonia Assistant Professor and Director of Opera Studies Don Marrazzo will lead a brief pre-opera talk and Q&A at this production. The talk will begin in the theatre at 12:30pm.
Marrazzo is a former head of the Vocal Studies Department and Professor of Voice at the Musical Horizons Conservatory (MHC) in Athens, Greece. He has maintained a teaching studio since 2002 and his students have performed with acclaimed institutions internationally including: the Metropolitan Opera; the Lyric Opera of Chicago; The Dallas Opera; The Glimmerglass Festival; the Santa Fe Opera; Staatsoper Stuttgart; Staatstheater Nürnberg, Opéra de Lyon; Oper Bonn; Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; the Dutch National Opera; Tiroler Festspiele Erl; the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra; the Philadelphia Orchestra; the American Globe Theatre; and the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
He also has served as a judge for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
Part of Arts in the Afternoon, which is sponsored by Dr. James M. & Marcia Merrins, Live at the Met is underwritten with support from Daniel S. Kaufman and Timothy W. Beaver
