The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez

John Adams’s groundbreaking work vividly brings to life President Nixon’s 1972 visit to communist China. Peter Sellars’s Met production, based on his 1987 world-premiere staging, features choreography by Mark Morris and stars James Maddalena as Nixon, Robert Brubaker as Chairman Mao, Janis Kelly as First Lady Pat Nixon, Russell Braun as Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, and Kathleen Kim as Chiang Ch’ing, Mao’s wife. From the pomp of the public displays to the intimacy of the protagonists most private moments, Adams, Sellars, and librettist Alice Goodman reveal the real characters behind the headlines in this landmark American opera.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle was one of the outstanding events of the past season. As before with the St Matthew Passion, star director Peter Sellars succeeded in creating a staging which made the spiritual and dramatic content of the Passion story even more intensive. The New York Times also praised the “brilliant and energetic” playing of the orchestra, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the “haunting, almost unsurpassable singing of all those involved.”

This DVD and Blu-ray derive from the world premiere performances, at the Dutch National Opera in 2016, of Only the Sound Remains, a Japanese-inspired double bill by Kaija Saariaho. Her first opera, L’Amour de loin, has captivated audiences around the world, and she composed Only the Sound Remains with the ethereal tones of Philippe Jaroussky in mind. Appropriately, the French countertenor plays two supernatural characters, an angel and a ghost. The fisherman and priest who encounter them are both sung by baritone Davone Tines, while the production is the work of the celebrated director Peter Sellars.

Peter Sellars production relocates Mozart's dramatic morality tale to the dark streets of Harlem. The twin Perry brothers play Leporello and Don Giovanni

This is an opera by the contemporary American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera on October 1, 2005. The work focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb (the "Trinity" test) was being prepared. A documentary was made about the creation of the opera, titled Wonders Are Many (2007).

Director Peter Sellars helms this provocative adaptation of George Frideric Handel's opera "Giulio Cesare," sung in the original Italian by soprano Susan Larson (who plays Cleopatra) and countertenor Jeffrey Gall (in the role of Julius Caesar) but set in a very different locale: a futuristic Middle East. Sellars personally wrote the English subtitles included in this version to match the tone he intended for his vision.

Motivated by the love that bound him to Mathilda Wesendonck, Richard Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde goes far beyond any simple operatic gesture. Peter Sellars’ production pours oil onto this troubled sea of emotions in an almost dematerialised setting bared of all earthly contingencies whilst Bill Viola presents the lovers’ initiatory quest for nirvana in videos detached from the stage, suspended like altarpieces.

Though performed in the original Italian, Peter Sellars' production of Cosi fan tutte relocates Mozart's comedy of love to the neon-and-chrome glare of a seaside diner, mirroring the turbulent world of late-twentieth-century America.