Berg: Wozzeck

OPERA
TUESDAY & SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 & 11, 2020 (continuing through JANUARY 22)
8:00 PM TUESDAY
1:00 PM SATURDAY

Metropolitan Opera
30 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side, Manhattan

$20-$445
https://www.metopera.org/season/2019-20-season/wozzeck/

Berg's taut, fast-moving, and just plain moving account of class degradation is surely one of the greatest of all operas.  (The opera was such a huge hit at its 1925 premiere in Weimar Germany that Berg worried it wasn't avant-garde enough!)  The South African multi-media expressionist William Kentridge showed that he was an adept Berg director with Lulu a few years ago.  And I, for one, can't wait to hear what Met Music Director Yannnick Nezét-Séguin — who has a way of bringing out things you've never heard before in familiar pieces — does with this gripping score.  Playing the downtrodden soldier Wozzeck we have Peter Mattei, who I'm comfortable calling the best mainstream operatic singing/acting baritone now on stage.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  After all that Austro-German angst, the sunny Mediterranean food at Boulud Sud.