Review: Opera at the Cinema

When I got back from the special screening of Tosca (see my last entry), I wrote an article straight away. Unfortunately I didn't really know what to do with it. So here it is.

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When I say opera, what do you think of? Women in massive dresses and equally massive wigs? Long, melodramatic soliloquies of a character who is apparently dying but still has enough breath left to sing for a good five minutes? Do you imagine the audience to be made up of snooty upper-class people in sequins and top hats, sporting tiny jewel-encrusted binoculars on golden handles?

Perhaps this is a bit of an exaggerated, almost cartoonish take on how people view opera, but I’m pretty sure plenty of people reading this are nodding in agreement, even if they know deep down it’s a little bit silly. I also know that it’s exactly these types of social and cultural stigmata, as well as the price of opera tickets in general, that have been behind the decline of opera’s popularity over the recent years. It’s seen as inaccessible, attended only by those who can afford it, and who understand it. In short, from the outside it can seem a little bit elitist.

This is, apparently, where the silver screen comes in to save the day.

This evening I was lucky enough to be invited to a special screening of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca at Vue Westfield, recorded live from the Royal Opera House. I’ll admit now that I have, in fact, studied opera in the past as part of my music degree, so I’m not exactly uninitiated, and I know what to look out for in terms of the structure of story and music. My knowledge of opera, on the flip side, also allows me to see how some might feel intimidated by the whole concept.

This is why I really appreciated the conductor’s brief but avid summary of the main characters and the story’s setting before the main show began. It broke the ice really well, and I felt that it made a huge difference in how ready the audience was to absorb the music and storyline. For example, the conductor (Antonio Pappano) highlighted a scene in Act III where Puccini tries to incorporate real church bells ringing at different locations offstage for a more authentic morning-in-Rome feel: when the scene itself occurred later on, I felt like we (the audience) all knew about the special secret behind the scene, which made it all the more enjoyable.

The show itself was, of course, perfect: the powerful Angela Gheorghiu leading as the fiery, jealous woman-in-love Tosca; smouldering Jonas Kaufmann as Tosca’s dashing lover, painter and rebel Cavaradossi; brilliant Bryn Terfel flourishing as the astoundingly malevolent, love-to-hate-him Chief of Police, Scarpia. Their voices were phenomenal, but the unique beauty of watching them on screen lay with the strategic camerawork. You’d have to pay good money to sit close enough to see every expression on every character’s face in the theatre, but in the cinema we were treated to a view from every character’s perspective. It’s in this way that the audience is also gently directed towards connecting with the characters.

Watching the whole thing with Vue’s Breatht4King technology (boasting four times the megapixels of 2K and HD), with high frame rates for fluid movement on screen and a wallop-packing sound system, I felt myself at times almost forgetting that I was in the cinema. I was hoping for a way in which opera would become more accessible to the masses, and I got that and more: not only does cinema-opera mean that opera doesn’t have to be limited to whoever can afford it, or whoever lives in a big city with an opera house, but it also provides a light and non-patronising way of educating the audience about the show, too.  Even better, it gives you a view of the action you don’t even get at the theatre unless you happen to be in the very prime seats.

Vue is about to launch a series of live-broadcast and recorded screenings of productions going on at the Royal Opera House, including operas and ballets (the latter being another cultural thing I believe people should appreciate more), and I do hope that this easier way of accessing them encourages more people to give them a go. Hopefully one day the image of top hats and jewel-encrusted binoculars will become more of a thing of amusing history rather than a modern-day caricature.