One of the most highly praised operas of recent years, which had its premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2000, Kaija Saariaho’s yearning medieval romance L’Amour de Loin (Love From Afar), has its Met premiere this season. The production is by Robert Lepage, co-produced with L’Opéra de Québec, where it premiered to acclaim last summer, in collaboration with Ex Machina. Debuting Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki leads the performance, which stars Susanna Phillips as Clémence, Eric Owens as Jaufré, and Tamara Mumford as the Pilgrim who carries messages of love between them.

The poetic work is inspired by the figure of the medieval troubadour and crusader Jaufré Rudel, who describes in his poems the ideal woman, who he has never met. He meets a pilgrim by chance, who tells him of a woman, similar to the one in the poems. But between them lies the Mediterranean sea. Thus in a yet another opera on love and death, one of the main characters becomes the sea itself. Its daily swells and motions, recreated on the stage by Lepage’s powerful imagination with the help of computer programming and special effects, turn the production into a spell-binding, musical and visual journey.

 Hypnotic! One of the most significant and successful operas of recent decades.                                                                                  John Allison, Gramophone