Stream: Live from the Met
I was never a great fan of Met cinema broadcasts in the early days. It seemed like an expensive way to watch opera, (Scottish Opera day tickets were under £10 then, and reasonable tickets for Covent Garden and Festival opera cost between £20 and £40), and besides I had for many years been listening free to the Met live radio broadcasts, which also had the bonus of the interval opera quiz! And as Hugh said in a review last week, watching film isn’t the same as a live performance.
But needs must. And in response to the current crisis, a number of platforms which usually charge a subscription are offering free broadcasts of opera and classical music. The list at gramophone.co.uk is being updated regularly, and includes live broadcasts to empty halls, and archived performances with an audience. Some are available by simply clicking on a link, others require you to subscribe, but for the time being this subscription is free. Some performances are shown at exact times – for example the LSO are presenting an archived concert on Thursdays at 7.30 and on Sundays at 7. The programme till the end of April has been announced. Others are releasing streams that will then be available all the time, e.g. the San Francisco Symphony are streaming concerts in four “batches” every Wednesday.
The availability of the Metropolitan Opera streams fall between these two. Every night at 7.30 Eastern Standard time a different opera is streamed which is available for 23 hours. This means that UK audiences will be one day behind the dates given online. This should ensure a better quality TV experience as we will be watching the operas at different times from the US audience. Apparently the first few free broadcasts were so popular that the system crashed. I watched La Fille du Regiment, March 20th’s broadcast, yesterday afternoon, on a non-smart TV linked to a lap-top and had no problems with the connection.
I couldn’t have chosen a better opera both to lift the spirits and to convince me of the benefits of opera on film. This was the 2008 recording of the Laurence Pelly production with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez. This production was incredibly popular at the Met and at Covent Garden, and even, if like me, you didn’t see it, the publicity pictures of Dessay in her vest and trousers with braces, and Florez in Tyrolean lederhosen still look very familiar. The plot is ridiculous, the characterisation consists of caricatures, and many of the laughs depend on slapstick, but it is entirely captivating from start to finish.
It’s set during the Napoleonic Wars and Dessay plays Marie, found as an infant on a battlefield. She has been adopted by the French regiment who are all her “fathers.” Despite their love for her, her day-to day life is as a skivvy, ironing piles of underwear , and peeling buckets of potatoes. Florez is Tonio, a Tyrolean who has rescued her from a fall as she was picking flowers. They are in love, but will the jealous fathers allow her to marry another man, and an enemy? An elderly Marquise and her butler, Felicity Palmer and Donald Maxwell, both in magnificent form, arrive to complicate the action with a tale of a mysterious heiress lost during a battle… So far, so Gilbertian. I got into opera through a childhood (and continuing) love for Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Donizetti comedies certainly show you where both get their ideas from.
Marie and Tonio are simple souls. Marie struggles with reading, despite tuition from the Sergeant Sulpice (Alessandro Corbelli, always worth seeing), whose attentions seem more than paternal, but who in the end succumbs to the more mature charms of the Marquise. Dessay and Florez, at the height of their powers, combine acting and singing in a convincing blend which is rare in any kind of opera. In Dessay’s first aria, the energy she expends ironing and her frustration are also what fuels the coloratura. It’s funny, but musically perfect. Listening would be a treat but seeing the physicality of her response adds an extra dimension. In Florez’s “Ah mes amis”, his eight high Cs in the final chorus are, of course, ringing and astonishing, but what matters is that they come at the end of a long aria in which he persuades the regiment that he is a deserving husband for their darling daughter. So in the final chorus, he’s proud as punch that he’s won Marie, and, if he can sing that well, why not celebrate with some high notes?
There are witty touches throughout the staging, and the spoken dialogue has added more jokes to Donizetti’s original, as Corbelli tells us in the interval talk. If it’s on again, please watch, and get the family to watch too. Anyone who thinks that opera is about fat women who die in the end is in for a surprise.
Although some of it is, for next week is Wagner week. (Details are not yet on the Gramophone website, but you’ll find them at metopera.org.) The 2010-2012 Ring Cycle, with Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt is on midweek, with Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton in Tristan from 2016 on Monday, and a 2014 Meistersinger and a 2015 Tannhauser, both with Johan Botha, on next weekend. I’ll definitely refresh my own memories of Die Walkure which I saw at the Met in 2011. Look out for the Valkyries on their chutes – nearly as good as Scottish Opera’s memorable biker warriors who could open beer bottles with their teeth. If only that was on film…
