NEW YORK – Yannick Nézet-Séguin is remaking the Metropolitan Opera from the underside up.

When the 48-year-old conductor leans ahead to increase his arms and emphasize vibrato or stretches excessive for a fortissimo throughout an orchestra live performance, the purple soles of his patent leather-based Christian Louboutins turn into seen. He almost leaves the bottom, a visible distinction to the ultimate years of predecessor James Levine, who carried out whereas seated from 2001 on and from a motorized wheelchair throughout his last 5 seasons due to Parkinson’s illness.

“I still feel that we are at the beginning of our journey together,” Nézet-Séguin stated throughout a rehearsal break final week. “I can appreciate maybe the growth in our understanding of Music, common understanding and the trust, so it feels much more like — I hate to say Yannick’s orchestra, because it’s not what it’s about — I’m there to just curate.”

Ending his fifth season as Music Director, he takes the Met on its first tour since 2011 and the primary solely of the orchestra since 2002, giving live shows from Tuesday by way of July 2 in Paris, London and Baden-Baden, Germany.

Nezet-Séguin has led eight new productions and 5 revivals as music director, amongst 23 stagings he’s carried out since his 2009 debut.

Music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2012-13 and of Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain since 2000, Nézet-Séguin has teamed with Met normal supervisor Peter Gelb to show the 140-year-old Met to extra up to date music in an try to have interaction a wider viewers. For years, the Met had been synonymous with Levine, its chief pressure as music or inventive director from 1976 to 2016, recognized for bushy hair and emphasis on Verdi, Wagner and Mozart.

“With the exception of the Vienna Philharmonic, great orchestras need music directors to create unifying forces artistically,” Met normal Peter Gelb stated. “They were still the same group of wonderful musicians but they were artistically rudderless without having a music director.”

Among a Met record 2,552 performances from 1971 to 2017, Levine conducted just two operas written after 1951: John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles” (1991) and John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby.”

Nézet-Séguin has led five since becoming music director, a varied assortment of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites,” Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” and “Fire Shut Up In My Bones,” Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” and Kevin Puts’ “The Hours.” Nézet-Séguin is scheduled to conduct Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” next season and Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded” to open 2024-25.

“What’s striking is the catholicity of his taste. I think for a long time, certainly in the Levine years, it seemed sometimes there was one new piece a decade,” said Aucoin, who is in the early stage of adapting Dostoyevsky’s “Demons” for the Met. “What’s really healthy about the kind of aesthetic ecosystem that Yannik is nurturing is that it relieves the pressure on every piece to be a singular masterpiece in the same tradition. And it also genuinely exposes audiences to some sense of the real diversity of music that’s out there. … You’ve got to write the bad operas to get to the good ones. Verdi knew that.”

Nézet-Séguin has given the Met a new look in his coiffure and attire. He dyed his short-dropped hair blond before the 2019-20 season and has traded the conductor’s uniform of tuxedos and tailcoats for outfits created by the Met costume department: colorful and sometimes floral shirts, a boxing robe for “Champion” and a blue band leader’s jacket with gold braid for Puccini’s “La Bohème.”

“He enjoys being a showman,” Gelb said, “but if anything it really is icing on the cake because what’s most important is that musically he is deeply sound.”

Originally hired by the Met in 2016 for a music director term to start in 2020, Nézet-Séguin moved up his start to 2018-19. Twelve orchestra musicians have been hired since Nézet-Séguin became music director designate in 2017.

“With Jimmy, he would basically just sit on the podium, shape the music and everybody just sort of came in to him in a way. And it was more a communication through eye contact, occasionally a wry smile on his face,” said Donald Palumbo, the Met’s chorus master since 2007. “With Yannick, you always feel there’s an active process going on with him trying to pull things out of the chorus and out of the orchestra.”

Nézet-Séguin has led the original French version of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” the first performances of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” since 2006, and in February conducts the return of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” He’s to conduct a new-to-the-Met Claus Guth staging of Strauss’ “Salome” in 2024-25, together with a revival of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” and in later years a brand new staging of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” with a director nonetheless to be chosen.

He led a touring celebration of 143 that flew to Paris final weekend and wanted 76 trunks of apparatus in a 747-400 freighter. The live shows function Aucoin’s “Heath (King Lear Sketches),” which premiered at Carnegie Corridor final week. New music has turn into extra central than he envisioned.

“After `Fire,′ I went to Peter and said, look, the audience is sending us a message here,” Nézet-Séguin stated. “We must take care of welcoming all the communities in our hall and so we need to reprogram and think: How can we build on these communities?”

Nézet-Séguin’s enthusiasm stimulated composers who regarded the Met as a museum.

“This new approach to programing the Met has undertaken is obviously really exciting, not just for me, but for all composers everywhere, that they’ve placed contemporary music at the center of what they’re doing,” Places stated. “The first time the orchestra plays the piece, you sense his excitement. That’s really important for a composer to get to feel that enthusiasm.”

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