The coronavirus pandemic forced the Metropolitan Opera to shut its doors for more than a year and a half. It also upended plans that had been in the works for the Met Orchestra’s first Asian tour.
Now, that idea is being revived. The Met announced on Thursday that the orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, would visit South Korea, Japan and Taiwan in June, performing the music of Bartok, Wagner, Debussy and others alongside star soloists.
The Met musicians have toured overseas just twice since 2000. Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said that, beyond showcasing them, the tour was meant to help the Met expand its network of fans abroad.
“It’s important that we serve our global constituency with live performances in person when we can,” he said. “It’s very good for the morale of the orchestra to be able to perform in major cities of the world.”
The tour, which includes stops in Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo and Hyogo, Japan, will feature more than 110 orchestra players, as well as the mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, the soprano Lisette Oropesa and the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn. The program includes concert performances of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and excerpts from various operas, including Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” as well as Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone.”
Last year Nézet-Séguin, who became the Met’s music director in 2018, led a company tour, the first since 2002, in Europe. (A 2021 tour there had also been canceled by the pandemic.) “Bringing live music and performances to audiences around the world is my passion,” he said in a statement.
Orchestra tours can be costly, and the Met’s finances have been strained recently: In January, the company said that it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment as it worked to recover from the pandemic closures, one of the most trying periods in its 141-year history. In the previous season, the Met took $30 million from its endowment fund.
But Gelb said the visit to Asia would generate a modest amount of revenue for the Met. The company has lined up several sponsors for the tour, including Rolex, Bank of America and So-Chung Shinn Lee, a longtime Met donor, and her husband, Tony W. Lee, an investor.
After a hiatus during the pandemic, American and European ensembles have returned to Asia, a booming market for classical music. The New York Philharmonic visited Hong Kong and Taiwan last year and sent a small group of musicians to Shanghai. The Philadelphia Orchestra sent a dozen musicians to Beijing and Shanghai last fall to mark the 50th anniversary of its pathbreaking visit to China in 1973.
Met musicians have performed in Asian countries before, but the orchestra has never led its own tour. In 2011, the company visited Japan for a series of performances to provide relief as the country grappled with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after an 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami.
Gelb said that he expected the Met orchestra would continue to tour overseas, though perhaps not every year. The company had been approached by presenters in mainland China about performing there in the future, he said, adding that the Met would be open to such visits.
“We want to take advantage of opportunities that make sense,” he said. “We think it’s very important for the Met to have direct contact with our international audience.”
