Last Saturday, I went to the cinema to see an opera - Rossini's The Barber of Seville, to be precise. This was not, I hasten to add, a film of the piece, but a live relay from the Metropolitan opera house in New York.
Live telecasts of opera have, of late, become something of a rarity, and the Met, rather enterprisingly, has taken to beaming its Saturday matinees - they start at 1.30 New York time - into cinemas around the world. I accordingly headed off to the Clapham Picturehouse to experience this comparatively new phenomenon at first hand.
The production itself opened last autumn to enthusiastic reviews. Bartlett Sher's staging is a suavely elegant affair - funny, raunchy, and with more than a few surprises up its sleeve. Figaro (Peter Mattei) is very much a proletarian libertine conniving with Juan Diego Florez's posh Almaviva to free Rosina (Joyce DiDonato) from the clutches of John Del Carlo's flashily dressed, very bourgeois Bartolo. At the end, we have a brief foretaste of the altogether darker comedy of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, to which The Barber of Seville was written as a prequel. A clever lighting plot suddenly turns the balcony of Bartolo's house into a guillotine and Figaro into the revolutionary he will eventually become. The performance was finely conducted by Maurizio Benini, and, for the most part, greatly sung.
Seeing a live cine-cast of an opera, however, is very different from experiencing it in the theatre or watching it on TV. In many respects, it's preferable to the latter, in that the sheer enormity of a movie screen confers tremendous immediacy on the proceedings. The whole thing was quite staggeringly filmed, with strategically placed cameras and ceaseless tracking shots drawing us in to the production rather than allowing us to watch it from a discreet distance.
On more than one occasion there was a sense of eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the performers that you rarely find even in the smallest opera houses, and certainly not in a vast auditorium like the Met.
You also get a strong sense of both the uniqueness and the thrilling danger of an individual live performance - though a cine-cast can also bring its fair share of problems too. Disguised as the unctuous priest Don Alonso, Florez managed to knock his wig off, at one point. The occasional camera shot misfired, meanwhile, spinning us into what felt like orbit rather than focusing in the relevant singer. On more than one occasion, we also lost the sound altogether, most drastically in the so-called 'calumny aria' sung by John Relyea's Basilio. 'Things get louder and louder,' he mouthed in total silence.
The sound quality, in this instance, proved to be the principal drawback. It was, I should point out, admirably clear and very spacious, but what it didn't always replicate is the genuine balance between stage and pit that you can only fully experience in an opera house. Having never been to the Met, I can't comment on how individual singers sound in its acoustic, but the sound, in this instance, seemed engineered to confirm equal weight on the voices, irrespective of their power. Florez, fabulous as always, sounded louder than I have ever experienced him in a theatre. DiDonato's blazing top notes, meanwhile, seemed occasionally robbed of their fullness.
The problem is not insuperable, however, and the benefits of the whole enterprise far outweigh its occasional flaws. Many of us don't have the opportunity to travel outside the UK to hear opera on a regular basis, so a cine-cast allows us to see live perforamnces that we won't otherwise experience first hand.
Saturday's audience consisted of seasoned operagoers, though the nature of the proceedings is comparatively informal - you can munch popcorn, if you want to, without fear of being ejected, as you would be at Covent Garden. The potential for drawing new listeners to opera is, of course, enormous, though the ticket prices - it currently costs £25 to get in - should perhaps be cheaper, if that is the intention.
The whole thing certainly blurs the boundaries between opera and cinema in ways that are often fascinating. In the interval, we were presented with a trailer for next month's broadcast of Puccini's Il Trittico. 'Murder, rapture and greed,' it announced, 'coming soon to a theatre near you.' I, for one, have every intention of going again.
