Last Minute Holiday Gift Guide	An Afternoon at the Opera by Jan Jezioro

Anna Netrebko

This Saturday, December 15, the Metropolitan Opera begins its second season of live HD simulcasts to theaters around the world with Charles Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette. Transmitted live, in high definition and surround sound, the Saturday afternoon opera broadcasts are shown locally at the Regal Transit Center Stadium multiplex on Transit Road in Lancaster.

The inaugural season, consisting of six live broadcasts, was an unqualified success, with 91 percent of all available seats—more than 300,000 tickets—sold worldwide in North America, Europe and Japan. The new season will feature eight simulcasts to several hundred more theaters, with projected ticket sales of 800,000, effectively matching the total ticket sales for all 225 Met Opera House performances this season.

The Metropolitan Opera has a long, rich history of radio broadcasts of its Saturday matinee performances, stretching back to 1931. Texaco, later ChevronTexaco, sponsored the broadcasts for 63 years, the longest continuous sponsorship in broadcast history. After Chevron ended its sponsorship in 2004, the Met was left scrambling for sponsors, until 2005, when the residential construction company Toll Brothers stepped in to become primary sponsor. The Met HD simulcasts to moviehouses builds on this tradition.

The HD simulcasts were the brainchild of Peter Gelb, the company’s new general manager. According to Gelb, the broadcasts have helped serve as a powerful marketing tool. “This is considered by any standards to be a great success,” Mr. Gelb said of the simulcast series in a recent New York Times interview. “There was considerable skepticism about whether this would work.” The programs were expensive to produce, and the Met had to use about $1 million in endowment money to make up the costs, but Gelb went on to say that this year’s expanded showings and the sales of rights and DVDs should mean that the program would at least pay for itself, with a surplus likely. Ticket subscriptions for this year’s season at the Met are also up by 10 percent over last year, welcome news at a time when most arts organizations are struggling to maintain their subscriber base.

The Met has been known for some time as a “singer’s house,” where artists with great voices appeared, for the most part, in conservative productions. Gelb, very aware of the aging demographics of the Met’s subscriber base, is attempting to win new audiences without alienating the faithful. One of his methods has been a renewed emphasis on the dramatic aspect of opera, best exemplified by his bringing award-winning Broadway directors to the house. Last season’s exciting new productions of the The Barber of Seville, directed by Tony award winner Bartlett Sher, and Il Trittico, directed by Broadway luminary Jack O’Brien, were among the highlights of the simulcast season. Along with the visually stunning production of composer Tan Dun’s new work, The First Emperor, directed by China’s leading film director Zhang Yimou and shown as a simulcast, these kinds of productions cannot help but win new audiences, both for the Met and for opera in general.

Why go to a movie theater to see a Met simulcast? Some might say that it is the next best thing to being at the Met itself, and to a certain extent that is true, but in other ways it is a completely different experience. One of the best reasons for many opera lovers is that you are experiencing the event as it is happening. That immediacy is part of the reason that the Met radio broadcasts have been popular for decades. Re-broadcasts or recordings have their charms, but they can never be a substitute for either hearing or seeing an opera in real-time.

Another reason for attending the simulcasts is that they provide you with what in effect is the best seat in the house. The Met has hired two television directors to coordinate the 10 cameras used to simulcast each production. The result is that the viewer in the movie theater enjoys pretty much the same viewpoint as the opera-goer sitting in the $300-plus seats, a genuine bargain at the $22 simulcast ticket price. Having seen The Barber of Seville, first at a simulcast at the Regal Theater, and later on the Metropolitan Opera stage last season, this writer could appreciate both the similarities and the differences of the two experiences. Though the Met is a very large house, the acoustics are superb throughout, even in a $130 seat in the very last row of the main floor. It was definitely a plus, however, for this opera-goer to have previously enjoyed the simulcast of the opera. Seeing the lovely and vivacious mezzo Joyce DiDonato in the role of Rosina and the versatile John Del Carlo in the comic role of Dr. Bartolo up close and personal in the simulcast, for instance, allowed the viewer to appreciate details in their finely crafted performances not easily discernable from the back of the house.

The eight operas to be performed this season should help to solidify the audience for Met opera simulcasts. Saturday’s Romeo et Juliette, with Roberto Alagna and Anna Netrebko in the title roles, gets the season off to a fine start. The Russian soprano Netrebko, who is rapidly moving into the superstar category, is a singer with a captivating high and deep voice that is both lustrous and velvety, with a stage presence to match. She ended up singing the very demanding mad scene in last season’s I Puritani flat on her back, with her head hanging over the stage into the orchestra pit. Gelb, who has signed Netrebko to do two productions a year, one new and one old, for the next several years, is counting heavily on her charismatic stage presence to re-invigorate Met audiences.

The rest of the simulcast schedule includes:

■ Hansel and Gretel—January 1. Featuring unconventional staging by Richard Jones, Humperdinck’s classic, the first opera ever broadcast by the Met in 1931, is sung in an English version led by the red-hot conductor Vladimir Jurowski. In the new production, Soprano Christine Shafer and Mezzo Alice Coote are joined by English tenor Philip Langridge as the witch—a first for the Met, echoing a German tradition of sometimes having a tenor sing the role more usually given to a mezzo.

■ Macbeth—January 12. Verdi’s early, breakthrough masterpiece is given a stylistically eclectic new production by the English director Adrian Noble, making his Met debut. James Levine conducts and acclaimed baritone Lado Ataneli stars in the towering title role.

■ Manon Lescaut—February 16. The phenomenonal Finnish soprano Karita Mattila adds another landmark role to her Met repertory, lending her charisma to the free-spirited beauty of the title role of Puccini’s opera, in a production conducted by Music Director James Levine.

■ Peter Grimes—March 15. Conductor Donald Runnicles leads the new production by John Doyle of Benjamin Britten’s masterpiece, featuring tenor Anthony Dean Griffey in the complex title role, and the riveting Patricia Racette as Ellen Orford, the woman who refuses to abandon him.

■ Tristan und Isolde—March 22. James Levine, an eminent conductor of Wagner, leads this much anticipated revival. Deborah Voigt, one of opera’s most acclaimed Wagnerian sopranos joins Ben Heppner, the leading Tristan of our time, in the portrayal of the archetypal couple on their mystical journey of love, sex and death.

■ La Boheme—April 5. Angela Gheorghiu will sing Mimi at the Met for the first time in 12 years, with the tenor Ramón Vargas as her lover, Rodolfo, in a production of Puccini’s best-loved opera conducted by the exciting young conductor Nicola Luisotti.

■ La Fille du Regiment—April 26. This new production of the Donizetti romp by Laurent Pelly is imported from England, where this past winter the Times of London called it “the operatic show of the season” when it opened at Covent Garden. “Audiences were dazzled by Natalie Dessay’s fearless coloratura and impeccable comic timing and by Juan Diego Flórez’s remarkable musicality—complete with the famous high Cs.”

Tickets for all performances may be purchased at the Regal Transit Center Stadium ticket booth. Since some shows sold out in advance last season, you may want to avoid getting shutout by purchasing tickets online at Fandango.com

WNED OPERA

CLUB MEMBERSHIP

WNED 94.5 has been broadcasting the Met Saturday matinee radio season ever since it came on the air over 30 years ago, and this season the station has decided to form an opera club based around the Met Opera theater presentations. Memberships include a quarterly newsletter and feature eight opera discussions, one for each simulcast, hosted by on-air personalities Stratton Rawson and Marty Wimmer at the WNED studios a week before each simulcast, with a final Opera Reception, also at the WNED studio. There are two membership levels:

■ $100 solo membership includes one ticket to two opera simulcasts at Regal Transit Center Stadium.

■ $150 duet membership includes two tickets to two opera simulcasts at Regal Transit Center Stadium.

To sign up or for more information contact Misty Harris at mharris@wned.org, or phone 845-7000.