BY KAREN BOSSICK
A magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera will close out the Metropolitan Opera’s 2025-26 Live in HD season on Saturday.
Sun Valley Opera and Broadway and Merlin’s Magic Lantern will present the Metropolitan Opera’s live simulcast of American composer and Grammy award-winner Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera at 10:55 a.m. Saturday, May 30, at Merlin’s Magic Lantern in Ketchum.
“El Ultimo Sueno de Frida y Diego” showcases the famously feuding pair reliving their tumultuous love and enduring creative bond in all its passion and pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell.
The opera is fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth with Frida, sung by three-time Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard leaving he underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, who’s played by baritone Carlos Alvarez. Rivera, nearing the end of his life, has called Frida Kahlo back from the underworld for one final reunion.
Leonard had her Met role debut earlier this season in the title role of Bizet’s “Carmen.”
The cast also features soprano Gabriella Reyes as Catrina, mistress of the underworld, and countertenor Nils Wanderer as Leonardo, who urges Frida to return to the land of the living not just for Diego but for herself and her art.
Frank has created a rich soundscape that draws on a wide musical palette with elements of mariachi and Mexican folkloric music. The marimba, a star in Mexican and Central American music, features prominently, often contributing an otherworldly mysterious color.
Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts the opera, which features libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Deborah Colker directed and choreographed the vibrant new production, which takes inspiration from Kahlo and Rivera’s paintings.
The New Yorker hailed it for its “confident, richly imagined score. The Los Angeles Times says that it “bursts with color and fresh individuality.”
Tickets are $22 for general audience members and $20 for seniors.