METROPOLITAN OPERA BROADCASTS.(Brief Article)

"I didn't bring Fidelio up to date," says director Jurgen Flimm. "The piece is up-to-date. The problem is these Pizarros, they are still living, they are still working everywhere in the world. We have to complain, take a stand, that these guys are still there, with their prisons, these concentration camps. It would be wonderful if the piece were less contemporary than it is."

Fidelio marks Flimm's Met debut -- one in a long series of major premieres for a director who led the Cologne Playhouse and Hamburg's renowned Thalia Theater during the 1970s, '80s and '90s, and who staged last summer's new Bayreuth Ring. For all his success in Germany, he's not an exponent of so-called Regietheater, which can translate as rewriting a piece in the director's own image. In the case of Fidelio, he says, "This was a carefully told story." Not that this way of approaching a piece is without its pitfalls, either. "When you do a piece in such a realistic way, there's always a danger people don't see it. You have to do a lot of detail, ...