23 matinee from the Met, the last of eight performances, will be broadcast to movie theaters around the world.) “Fire” premiered in 2019 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and was brought to the Met as part of a co-production that will travel to the Lyric Opera of Chicago in March and Los Angeles Opera in a future season. A wrenching tale of child molestation in segregated northern Louisiana of the 1970s is is beautifully composed with nuances of shade and color. The evening was a triumph for Blanchard, a 59-year-old jazz trumpeter and composer who like Blow is from Louisiana. Blow, The New York Times opinion columnist whose 2014 memoir was adapted for the opera. And when it was over more than three hours later, about nine more minutes of applause for the cast, the composer, librettist Kasi Lemmons, the production team and finally Charles M. There was a minute ovation for the orchestra at the start, even before “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung with many a shimmering high note. The return attracted a far more diverse audience than usually attends the Met and was simulcast live to video screens in Times Square and Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park. With many of the women wearing evening gowns and jewels and a large percentage of the men in black tie and even a few in white tie, tails and top hats, people greeted each other to celebrate their return to Lincoln Center after an absence they never imagined.Īfter a historic gap of 566 days, the country’s largest performing-arts organization had resumed staged presentations in the start of the season scheduled to run until June 11.

That is how much of the audience of about 4,000 in the Metropolitan Opera felt as they watched Monday night’ landmark performance, the first staged work in the house since March 2020 and the first by a Black composer in the long history of a company that launched in 1883.

We sway!” sings the chorus in the second act of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” NEW YORK (AP) - “We bend, we don’t break.

Misty composer