Peter Mattei

The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.

Live performance at Théâtre de l’Archevêché du Festival d’art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence 2002. Daniel Harding conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Choeur de l'Académie Européenne de Musique. Directed for stage by Peter Brook.

An intimate portrait of director Peter Brook by his son, Simon Brook.

Condensing the life stories – memories of prison in Silesia – related by Dostoyevsky in his work The House of the Dead, Leoš Janáček composed an opera filled with burning desire and longing. Contagious savagery, cruelty and brutality are exacerbated by the confines of the prison. However, within its concrete walls emerge both tenderness and cruelty at the sight of an injured bird; a multitude of stories and highly personal monologues. With this production, first performed at the Wiener Festwochen in 2007, the Paris Opera pays tribute to Patrice Chéreau.

Inspired by Pushkin's masterpiece of Russian literature, Tchaikovsky’s opera provides a sublime portrait – both ironic and sympathetic – of a character embittered by society life, rejecting love out of vanity, killing his friend the poet Lenski out of pride and spending the rest of his days in abject despair. A repertoire classic, Willy Decker’s streamlined production makes the Paris Opera echo once more to the strains of Russian romantic music. Edward Gardner conducts an exceptional cast including Peter Mattei in the title role and Anna Netrebko as Tatiana.

Met Music Director James Levine leads this Live in HD presentation of Wagner’s early Romantic opera, starring Johan Botha in the title role of the minnesinger torn between earthly passion and true love. Eva-Maria Westbroek is Elisabeth, whose unswerving devotion redeems Tannhäuser’s soul, and Peter Mattei sings Wolfram, his faithful friend. Michelle DeYoung as the love goddess Venus and Günther Groissböck as Landgraf Hermann complete the cast. Otto Schenk’s classic production was the first of his acclaimed Wagner stagings at the Met.

The young wine god Dionysus returns to his native town of Thebes after having established his cult in the east. In his entourage, he has a run of Bacchantes. Semele, his mother, was distrusted by her family when she claimed that Zeus was the father of her child. Dionysus has come to restore her, revealing his divinity, and require proper worship of the Theban legion.

In its most ambitious effort yet to bring the joy and artistry of opera to audiences everywhere during the Met’s closure, the company presented an unprecedented virtual At-Home Gala, featuring more than 40 leading artists performing in a live stream from their homes all around the world.

A brand new production of ‘’Tannhäuser’’ at the Staatsoper Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim, staged and choreographed by Sasha Waltz, who has already staged Purcell and Berlioz, Dusapin, Rihm and Hosokawa. Now Sasha Waltz brings to the stage a grand romantic Wagner’s opera with a star cast of some of today best Wagnerian singers: Peter Seiffert in the title role, Réne Pape as Landgraf and Peter Mattei as Wolfram, Ann Petersen sings Elisabeth and Marina Prudenskaya is Venus.

A tribute to marriage coming from a bachelor is a tad suspicious. But for Beethoven the idealization of the woman-bride was heartfelt and sincere. It has always been a unique opera starring a courageous wife who wows audiences. Fidelio is a moral title, associated with the ideals of liberty of the French Enlightenment. Nobility and commoners are united in their thirst for justice against the oppression of power. For once the faithful consort of a desaparecido wins her battle against a treacherous tyrant, and the collective joy truly is “nameless”, as is sung on the stage. Especially because the “our heroes to the rescue” finale is recounted by the triumphant symphonic flair of the quintessential musician. Beethoven really does bring the world to collapse at the conclusion of this opera, which begins like a delightful little comedy, but which scales and transcends all the summits of the dramatic-musical art.

The Wiener Philharmoniker mounts, and Andrea Breth stages, this 2007 production of Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, starring Peter Mattei, Joseph Kaiser, Anna Samuil and Renée Morloc. The Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor lends added musical accompaniment, under the baton of Daniel Barenboim.

Tony Award–winning director Ivo van Hove makes a major Met debut with a new take on Mozart’s tragicomedy, re-setting the familiar tale of deceit and damnation in an abstract architectural landscape and shining a light into the dark corners of the story and its characters. Maestro Nathalie Stutzmann makes her Met debut conducting a star-studded cast led by baritone Peter Mattei as a magnetic Don Giovanni, alongside the Leporello of bass-baritone Adam Plachetka. Sopranos Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, and Ying Fang make a superlative trio as Giovanni’s conquests—Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Zerlina—and tenor Ben Bliss is Don Ottavio.

The Met assembled an ideal cast for François Girard’s acclaimed new production of Wagner’s final masterpiece: Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of the fool “made wise by compassion”, René Pape as Gurnemanz, the veteran Knight of the Grail, Katarina Dalayman as Kundry, Peter Mattei is Amfortas, the anguished ruler of the Grail’s kingdom, and Evgeny Nikitin sings the evil magician Klingsor.

The Marriage of Figaro is one of the most emblematic operas in the repertoire. Brahms spoke of it as a “miracle” and the Countess' complaint still resonates today as one of the most heartbreaking musical pages. It was by resuming Beaumarchais' comedy, which caused a scandal in Parisian society, that Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte began their first collaboration. The play was banned by Joseph II in 1785 at the Vienna Theater. Is it because it exposed too much to the forefront the contradictions of an already faltering regime, ready to collapse with the French Revolution? Netia Jones preserves the very essence of Beaumarchais' play by questioning human relationships with humor but not without mischief, in a production which confuses reality and fiction to the point of asking, like the Count: "Are we playing a comedy?" »

Richard Eyre’s elegant production, which opened the Met’s 2014–15 season, sets the action of Mozart’s timeless social comedy in a manor house in 1930s Seville. Ildar Abdrazakov leads the cast as the resourceful Figaro set on outwitting his master, the philandering Count Almaviva, played by Peter Mattei. Marlis Petersen sings Susanna, the object of the Count’s affection and Figaro’s bride-to-be, Amanda Majeski is the Countess, and Isabel Leonard gives a standout performance as the pageboy Cherubino. Music Director James Levine on the podium brings out all the humor, drama, and humanity of Mozart’s score.

Berg’s 20th-century shocker stars baritone Peter Mattei in the title role, with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium and soprano Elza van den Heever as the long-suffering Marie. Groundbreaking visual artist and director William Kentridge unveils a bold new staging set in an apocalyptic wasteland.

Peter Mattei, Malin Byström, Andrew Staples and other world-famous soloists join the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and members of the Swedish Radio Choir in Berwaldhallen in this unique staging of Mozart’s famous opera. Don Giovanni is a beloved staple of the operatic repertoire that has inspired generations of composers, writers and philosophers. The opera’s light-hearted elements are tempered by sorrow, drama and – in the unforgettable finale – supernatural horror.

Audiences went wild for Bartlett Sher’s dynamic production, which found fresh and surprising ways to bring Rossini’s effervescent comedy closer to them than ever before. The stellar cast leapt to the challenge with irresistible energy and bravura vocalism. Juan Diego Flórez is Count Almaviva, who fires off showstopping coloratura as he woos Joyce DiDonato’s spirited Rosina—with assistance from Peter Mattei as the one and only Figaro, Seville’s beloved barber and man-about-town.

Met performances of Strauss’s white-hot one-act tragedy, which receives its first new production at the company in 20 years. Claus Guth, one of Europe’s leading opera directors, gives the biblical story—already filtered through the beautiful and strange imagination of Oscar Wilde’s play—a psychologically perceptive Victorian-era setting rich in symbolism and subtle shades of darkness and light.

Don Juan sins with his servant and is doomed in this tragicomic opera.