Wagner at the Multiplex — The new new thing in opera

Ten days ago I read two articles by opera critics who, though initially skeptical, decided to try out the Metropolitan Opera's live high-definition broadcast in their local movie theaters.

Both are now converts and proselytizers for this new wrinkle in this old, seemingly moribund and circling-the-drain art.

Here's Lorna Dolan's take from the March 29, 2008 Financial Times.

Wagner and a bucket of popcorn

Ashford, if you don’t know it, is a small provincial town in Kent. The old centre, destroyed by 1970s urban planning, is now bleak and lifeless, while housing estates and supermarkets have sprung up around the periphery, linked by dual carriageways and roundabouts.

It is, in short, a place that probably has more in common with many other provincial towns around the world than it does with its own capital city. That is certainly true when it comes to culture. London is just 75 minutes away by train, but light years away in terms of the variety and quality of arts on offer.

A multiplex cinema just off a motorway junction really is all that is available in Ashford. They know their market: when I first moved to the area with my family from London, I saw "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to the accompaniment of thudding seats, as a stream of people left.

Yet a couple of weeks ago, when I was standing in the foyer waiting to take my children to "The Spiderwick Chronicles," "Peter Grimes" came up on the box office matrix display. Britten’s "Peter Grimes," one of my favourite operas, in Ashford? Sure enough, it was being shown, transmitted live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Next week, "Tristan und Isolde" [top] would be showing.

Wagner is even higher up my list of favourite composers than Britten, but I held back. The tickets were £25. What sort of experience would I be getting for my money? “High definition video”: wasn’t that just posh TV? Would there be a single camera pointed at the stage? Or different shots and close-ups, exposing the singers’ notoriously limited acting skills?

Then, what would it be like going to an opera at Cineworld? London’s Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne and the Met are all beautiful venues that provide a sense of occasion. Arcade machines, Coca-Cola and pick ’n’ mix candy hardly provide the same ambience. Would we really be going from Wagner’s “höchste Liebeslust” to the popcorn counter for our interval refreshments?

In the end, I decided I had to see for myself. As we took our seats — all 16 of us — on the screen were larger-than-life images of the New York matinée audience settling down in a packed opera house. I felt like a dog waiting for scraps from well-dressed guests at a dinner party.

Then the opera started and we didn’t feel like dogs any more. We, the humble Ashfordians, were the guests of honour. It is relayed in real time, and that is an essential part of the experience. We had a view that you can’t get, even from the best seats in the house. We saw James Levine conducting as though we were in the orchestra; director Dieter Dorn’s gorgeous colour-saturated stage pictures from the most advantageous angle and Deborah Voigt’s bright blue eyes (right), a stunning contrast to her flowing red wig, widen with sudden, unexpected love.

The Met seems to have installed cameras everywhere. At times the video director, Barbara Willis Sweete, seemed a little too excited by the possibilities: she could have twiddled the split screen dial rather less. But she was clearly making an intelligent attempt to bridge the different demands of screen and stage. And not all the acting fared as well as Voigt’s under the camera’s scrutiny: Robert Dean Smith, flown in from Berlin to replace a sick Ben Heppner as Tristan, has a face that does little except sing.

As for the all-important sound quality, there wasn’t the overwhelming rush of energy that comes from being in the same room as an orchestra playing at full power, but it was very good.

The key moments — the drinking of the love potion and Isolde’s Liebestod – still sent goosebumps shivering up me in a wave.

This is the second season of live transmissions from the Met – to cinemas across the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and Europe, thanks to funding from the Neubauer family. La Scala in Milan and the San Francisco opera have similar schemes. The UK’s opera houses are catching up. Glyndebourne has put a toe in the water, with cinema transmissions of recorded performances, and the Royal Opera House has recently announced that it is to start cinema showings in the UK. But for the moment these are recordings, not livecasts: the necessary technology is not yet in place.

This is a trend that seems to be growing. I am certainly converted. For those of us stuck in any one of 15 provincial centres in the UK, it is a marvellous opportunity to experience how sublime music can transcend even the most banal of settings.

Metropolitan Opera is transmitting ‘La Bohème’ on April 5 and ‘La Fille du Régiment’ on April 26. www.metoperafamily.org/metopera. Royal Opera House transmission details from www.royalopera.org.

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Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal wrote the following appreciation on March 29, the same day as Dolan.

The Metropolitan Opera Goes to the Movies

And a Skeptic Finds Himself Won Over by the Experience

When Peter Gelb took over the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, one of the first innovations he announced was a series of live closed-circuit opera telecasts to be beamed from New York's Metropolitan Opera House into movie theaters around the world. I promptly noted in this space that such telecasts had already been tried and found wanting, both by the Met itself in 1952 and by other high-culture institutions, and I predicted that the venture would be quietly scuttled after a season or two.

Wrong. Way, way wrong.

Nearly 300,000 people turned out for the Met's first season of live Saturday-afternoon simulcasts, and attendance is expected to climb to a million this season. (The next simulcast, Puccini's "La Bohème," is set for April 5, with second-day repeat transmissions in many locations. For more information, visit the company's Web site, www.metoperafamily.org/metopera) They've been so successful, in fact, that they're already spawning imitators: La Scala aired its first movie-house relay in December, and San Francisco Opera launched a series of its own earlier this month.

Why are these telecasts so popular? To find out, I traveled to Philadelphia on March 15 and viewed the Met's Saturday matinee of Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes" at an upscale University City multiplex. It's a new production by John Doyle, the British theater director who is best known in this country for his ingenious small-scale Broadway versions of Stephen Sondheim's "Company" and "Sweeney Todd." I prepared myself by first seeing the production in the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, where it opened on Feb. 28. That performance left me with the same mixed feelings described by Heidi Waleson in her Wall Street Journal review of "Grimes," in which she criticized Mr. Doyle's staging as abstract, undramatic and confusing. The simulcast, by contrast, was considerably more effective than the live performance I'd seen at the Met two weeks earlier. In fact, it was overwhelming — one of the most memorable experiences I've had in a lifetime of opera-going.

What made the difference? Watching a well-directed high-definition digital telecast of an opera on a movie-house screen puts you within arm's length of the singers. (One of the cameras is actually mounted on a remote-controlled dolly placed on the lip of the stage.) In a large house like the Met, all but a few seats are far from the stage, meaning that you have to use opera glasses to see the singers' faces. Not so on screen, where Gary Halvorson, the video director, emphasized tight close-ups and shrewdly chosen reaction shots that clarified the dramatic relationships between the various characters. What had been unsatisfyingly vague in the opera house became compellingly specific on the movie screen. Add to this the excellent intermission features, which included on-the-spot backstage interviews with Mr. Doyle, conductor Donald Runnicles and Anthony Dean Griffey and Patricia Racette, the stars of the production, and the result was a show far more involving than the one I saw in the opera house on from my opening-night orchestra seat.

The audience for the Philadelphia screening of "Peter Grimes" clearly shared my enthusiasm. I sat next to a local opera buff who has never enjoyed watching operas on TV and was skeptical about seeing one in a movie theater. "Grimes" changed her tune. "I've never been close enough to the stage to be able to see that kind of detail," she said. "I can't afford it — I sit in the cheap seats. Watching the singers up close changes the whole effect. It got me right in the throat."

University City is a college town, and I wondered whether the crowd there was representative, so I called up my father-in-law, Charles Dyson, who saw the second-day replay of "Grimes" at a multiplex in suburban Connecticut, and asked him what it was like. "Everybody in the theater seemed really excited," he told me. "And the simulcasts have been selling out up here — if you don't buy tickets in advance, you can't get in on Saturday."

So will the Met's movie-house simulcasts create a new audience for opera in America? Maybe — but there's a catch. One of the goals of the Met's various new-media ventures, which also include live broadcasts of selected performances via Sirius Satellite Radio and Web-based streaming audio, is to attract a younger cohort of media-savvy opera-goers. Alas, the audience that saw "Grimes" in Philadelphia consisted mainly of senior citizens, and so, Mr. Dyson told me, did the Connecticut crowd.

Can the Met persuade under-30 viewers to attend its simulcasts? Is it even trying? Why not launch an ad campaign aimed specifically at college students? I can think of one selling point right off the bat: You'll pay as much as $295 for a premium orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera House, with center parterre boxes going for a cool $320 apiece. I paid $22 for my movie-house ticket, not counting popcorn.

Cheaper tickets for a better show — that's my kind of deal.