Metropolitan Opera Broadcast //Anthony Davis: X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, the prominent figure from the African-American civil rights movement who suffered a tragic fate and remains divisive to this day, is probably best known to Hungarian audiences through Spike Lee's biographical film. This time, however, we get to meet him as the title character of an opera. This work Anthony Davis composed in the 1980s is now making its debut at the Met, starring baritone Will Liverman, who at the same theatre recently brought tremendous success to Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a wonderful contemporary African-American opera with a similarly sensitive theme.
Schedule
This first opera by Davis, who has since won a Pulitzer Prize for music among other awards in the course of his career, received its official world premiere in 1986 at the New York City Opera, right next door to the Met. Yet X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X would still take 37 years to make it to the other side of Lincoln Center. However, both the subject and Davis's music, rich in jazz, blues and gospel sounds - and newly revised for this occasion - promises an exciting experience, just as Robert O'Hara's directing is certain to be electrifying, presenting the narrative of Malcolm X's journey through his operatic life as a universal one, a story spanning space and time, on the stage and on the screens of the global broadcast. Conducting the new production will be Kazem Abdullah, who is well known both at the Met and within the American concert and opera words, as well as in Europe. Will Liverman's Malcolm will be joined by a cast of uniformly exceptionally talented African-American singers in the performance.
From the 2023/24 season, we will be providing surtitles for foreign-language operas exclusively in Hungarian.
The ‘Metropolitan Opera Live in HD' transmissions have been made possible through the cooperation of our partner, liveincinema.eu s.r.o.
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