James Levine's 25th Anniversary Metropolitan Opera Gala was a concert lasting (including intermissions) approximately eight hours, that the Metropolitan Opera staged in 1996 in honour of its then principal conductor and artistic director. Excerpts from the gala were released by Deutsche Grammophon on a 72-minute CD, a 161-minute VHS videocassette and a 161-minute double Laserdisc in 1996, and on a 293-minute double DVD in 2005.
Background James Levine made his début at the Metropolitan Opera at the age of twenty-seven. On 5 June 1971, he conducted a matinée performance of Tosca with Grace Bumbry in the title role, Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi and Peter Glossop – also making his Met début – as Scarpia. Levine was the longest serving conductor in the Met's history, becoming its principal conductor in 1973, its music director in 1976 and its inaugural artistic director in 1986. At the time of his gala, he had led the Met in 1,646 performances of sixty-eight operas, twenty-one of which he had introduced into the company's repertoire. He had also notably initiated the Met's series of television broadcasts with a production of La Bohème starring Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto in 1977.James Levine's 25th Anniversary Metropolitan Opera Gala, conducted by James Levine, Deutsche Grammophon CD, 449-177-2, 1996
The Met celebrated the silver anniversary of Levine's arrival there with a concert on 27 April 1996. Fifty-eight soloists contributed to a gala that lasted from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. on the following morning. They performed on three sets: an Ezio Frigerio design for Act 1 of Francesca da Rimini, a gift of Mrs Donald D. Harrington; a Günther Schneider-Siemssen design for Act 2 of Arabella, a gift in part of Mrs Michael Falk; and a Schneider-Siemssen design for Act 2 of Tannhäuser, a gift of the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation and of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. The gala as a whole was sponsored by Mrs Emily Fisher Landau. Its television broadcast was sponsored by Mrs Harrington, the Texaco Philanthropic Foundation, Inc., and the National Endowment For the Arts, in association with Deutsche Grammophon, the United Kingdom's BBC Worldwide Television, Japan's NHK, Holland's Nederlandse Programma Stichting, Denmark's Danmarks Radio, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Sweden's Sveriges Television.James Levine's 25th Anniversary Metropolitan Opera Gala, conducted by James Levine, Deutsche Grammophon DVD, B00004602-09, 2005
Performances