Birth and Transfiguration: Katherine Syer admires a spectacular Isolde in New York

Review of Tristan und Isolde, directed Sharon, conducted Nézet-Séguin, New York Met, 2026. 

July 2026, Volume 20, Number 2, 73–7.

Yuval Sharon recently described the score of Tristan und Isolde as akin to navigating perpetual quicksand – you are never on sure footing – before pivoting to another analogy the director favours: it is also like surfing – waiting for waves, knowing a big one is coming. For his production at the Metropolitan Opera, Sharon has endeavoured to maintain structural tension throughout, with the visual language always partly concrete (a table downstage, recognisable rituals) and partly abstract (a tunnel/acting area suspended above the stage floor, the drifting geometry of a split set).