I have mixed feelings about attending livecasts (to me, they have the disadvantages of live performance -- rigid start times, sitting crammed in with other people -- without the compensating thrill of in-the-moment live sound, and in addition, they're generally more expensive to attend than it would be to buy a DVD) but I'm glad they exist, especially these days when the larger local organizations (that would be the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony, in case you were wondering) are retreating headlong and frantically into the most conservative possible programming and staging. So the more variety available, the better. The Met obviously is the current big leader in these livecasts, but there's increasing competition from a group called Opera in Cinema, which has been livecasting from La Scala and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. (Click here for their website, where you can enter your zipcode and find out which theaters near you offer their shows, and also see some of their previous offerings.)
So here's the promising part: Opera in Cinema is teaming with Opus Arte and so will be adding livecasts from Covent Garden (the first livecast will be September 10, when the Royal Opera opens with Jonathan Miller's production of Cosi Fan Tutte). And not only will they be livecasting from these three great European houses, but they have a new ballet series, and a Shakespeare series from the Globe Theater in London -- I can't wait for that one. Perhaps my dream of seeing an actual performance of Timon of Athens will be coming true! And I have high hopes that DVDs will result, since Opus Arte regularly releases very high quality sets -- in fact, they released one of my recent favorites, Messiaen's Saint Francois from Amsterdam. Remember the days when we'd occasionally get live stuff like that out here? Ah, what an opera fan I am -- longing for the good old days!
2 comments:
Rightly or not, I do think you have come up with the definitive defintion of an "opera fan."
I went to a live broadcast a few years ago of "La Boheme" out on the Mall (from, uh, the Kennedy Center!), on a Jumbotron. I was struck by how packed the event was, including families, students, and all the other cohorts that aren't interested in opera, they say. A real opera fan wouldn't have been happy with the quality, etc, but I thought it was a great event in general. The Shakespeare theater did a live broadcast last weekend from The National Theater. I didn't go, but now that you've mentioned the possibility of one from the Globe, I'm going to see if they're going to do that!
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