The Met Opera 2025-2026 Season. The brilliant revival of Puccini’s final masterpiece Turandot
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2025-26 Season opened with the Met premiere of the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Met premieres of Innocence, and El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, alongside dazzling new stagings of La Sonnambula, I Puritani, and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde starring Lise Davidsen will also delight audiences this season. Opera favorites return too, with extended runs of La Bohème, La Traviata, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, and more.
Puccini’s Turandot is the backbone of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2025-26 season.
Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular, audience-pleasing production returned and will run again toward the end of the season. There will be two conductors and three different casts, including four different Turandots.
Veteran Metropolitan Opera conductor Carlo Rizzi was on the podium on the opening night of this glorious performance, the first in the Met’s 18th revival of Franco Zefferelli’s resplendent 1987 production of Turandot, Puccini’s epic love story set in a fantasy version of Imperial China.
The lavish staging – with its amazing sets (newly refurbished for this revival), fairy-tale exoticism, sumptuous costumes, throngs of choristers, dancers, acrobats and supernumeraries crowding the huge Met stage – continued to elicit oohs and aahs of astonishment.
Musically, the performance was even more thrilling, with superb singing and acting by the principals, outstanding work from the chorus, and a fine rendition of Puccini’s ingenious, complex score.
In this opening run, soprano Angela Meade portrays the beautiful, but cold-hearted principessa of the title, hellbent on exacting revenge for the abduction and murder of her ancestress Princess Lou-Ling. Tenor Michael Fabiano sings the impulsive, hot-headed Prince Calaf, who seeks to win her hand by answering her three riddles. Bass Vitalij Kowaljow is Calaf’s father, the vanquished King Timur, and soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha plays the king’s slave girl, Liù.
In her Met role debut, Meade used her deeply expressive dramatic soprano to create a captivating portrayal. Thoroughly at ease in the demanding part, she demonstrated astounding vocal prowess and a broad emotional range, vividly portraying feelings ranging from bloodthirsty anger to extreme tenderness. Her voice, thoroughly focused and firm in her opening “In questa regia”, was its most powerful and terrifying in the riddle scene.
Fabiano, another Met role debut, was ideally cast as the resolute, riddle-solving prince, totally conveying his character’s unguarded infatuation. Ardent and attractive in his pursuit of the unattainable princess, his clean, large-voiced tenor was uncommonly tender in his “Non piangere, Liù” and pure gold in the long, sweeping lines of “Nessun dorma”.
As Liù, the slave girl secretly in love with Calaf, and who chooses to commit suicide rather than betray the prince, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha made a highly promising company debut. With her appropriately sweet and graceful soprano, she delivered a ravishingly nuanced, heart-stopping portrayal – from her Act 1 “Signore, ascolta!” to her vivid and tremendously emotional “Tu che di gel sei cinta” in Act 3, just before she stabs herself to death.
Kowaljow was a full-voiced, Timur, the exiled King of Tartary, especially touching after Liù’s death. In one of the opera’s more nostalgic scenes, baritone Hansung Yoo (company debut), tenors Tony Stevenson and Rodell Rosel deftly portrayed Turandot’s capricious ministers, Ping, Pang and Pong, as they dreamily reminisced about their country cottages in their quiet and dreamy trio, “Ho una casa nell’Honan”.
The 100-plus members of the always adaptable Met Chorus were impressive throughout, tremendously energetic and powerful as they urged the executioner on in Act 1, totally mesmerizing in the quieter passages, such as their radiant invocation of the moon that immediately followed, and nothing less than sublime in their ardent adulation of their Emperor in the finale.
The Met Orchestra was at its finest, completely responsive to Rizzi’s every gesture, as he elicited all the colors and subtle, highly nuanced leitmotifs in Puccini’s suave and brilliantly original score. When the maestro brought the performance to its electrifying conclusion, the audience broke out into raucous applause.
The opera-lovers highly appreciated the standout singing and orchestral playing and the resplendent stage dressing in this magnificent performance of Puccini’s final masterpiece.
Fall 2025 Highlights at the Met
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — Sept 21–Oct 11
Don Giovanni — Sept 24–Nov 22
Turandot — From Sept 23 onward
La Sonnambula — Oct 6–Nov 1
La Fille du Régiment — Oct 17–Nov 12
La Bohème — Oct 21–May 2
Carmen — Oct 28–Jan 23
Arabella — Nov 10–29
Andrea Chénier — Nov 24–Dec 13
By Alex Arlander | ENC News
