The Opera at your Multiplex!

Terfel as Scarpia Royal Opera House, London, June 2006

I love, love, love this idea

The Metropolitan Opera announced yesterday that it would begin broadcasting live performances into movie theaters across the United States, Canada and Europe, rubbing shoulders with professional wrestling and rock concerts.

The broadcasts are part of a strategy by the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, to widen the house’s appeal by branching out into new media. The Met also said on Wednesday that it was opening its vast archive of historic radio broadcast performances for streaming and downloading. And it is pursuing deals to have more than 100 performances a season streamed live on the Internet and digital radio.[…]The Met was able to move forward with the plan after having reached agreements with its unions over fees. Opera broadcasts have already dwindled because of the high cost of producing them, and provisions do not even exist for digital delivery, like Internet streaming and downloading.

Kudos to Peter Gelb for some forward thinking that will help give opera a wider audience. This is very exciting. It is a common thing, in Europe and the UK for operas to be broadcast live on television. Here in America, a larger market, the smaller audience numbers don’t inspire such broadcasts, but I wouldn’t mind going to a movie theater to see Bryn Terfel play the nefarious and evil Baron Scarpia when he performs Tosca at the Met in ’09, (with soprano Karita Matitla as Tosca and the great Marcello Alvarez as Mario) especially if tickets will be as hard to come by as I suspect they will be.

For now, the Met has arrangements with three companies that provide programming to movie theaters. They will transmit six performances, all on this year’s slate of regular Saturday-afternoon Met broadcasts, starting Dec. 30 with a shortened, translated version of “Die Zauberflöte,” directed by Julie Taymor. The other broadcasts will be of “I Puritani,” starring Anna Netrebko; “The First Emperor,” a new opera by Tan Dun; “Yevgeny Onegin,” with Renée Fleming and Dmitri Hvorostovsky, conducted by Valery Gergiev; “The Barber of Seville”; and “Il Trittico.”

Bravo!