Posted by Andrew Alexander on Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 9:25 AM
- KEN HOWARD/MET OPERA
- Anna Netrebko sings the lead role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” the first of the Met’s broadcasts for the 2011-2012 season.
This season, when soprano Natalie Dessay declares herself “Sempre Libera” in front of a blank wall that Samuel Beckett might have found too bleak for his tastes, opera fans in Russia, Israel, China, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Morocco, Slovenia, the U.S. Virgin Islands (and of course, Atlanta) will be able to watch it live. The Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcasts start up again this weekend on Saturday, October 15. This year there’ll be more people than ever watching because the program has expanded its worldwide distribution to 1,600 theaters in 54 countries. Last year about 800,000 people visited the Met in New York to see a show, but a staggering 2.6 million bought tickets for the HD broadcasts.
The season kicks off with Anna Netrebko taking on the punishing lead role in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. Wagner’s Ring Cycle continues, there’s some Philip Glass and Handel, and a Faust and a Manon, so it should be a fascinating and varied season, in spite of the Met general manager Peter Gelb’s continued quest to strike all the popular, lush, and expertly-executed Zeffirelli sets and replace them with blank walls, chain-link fences, and piles of bricks. (We still remember The New York Times review of last year’s new Traviata, in which the writer remarked—without irony—that the production received “surprisingly little booing.”)
And best wishes to Maestro James Levine for a speedy recovery: His presence and expertise at the podium will certainly be missed during his temporary absence by those of us attending the broadcasts, but perhaps most of all during this fall’s Siegfried: Those who attended last year’s productions of Rheingold and Walküre assumed it would be a journey we’d complete with Levine.
Anyway, Creative Loafing will be covering it all again this year, so we hope you’ll join us on the journey. Use the comment sections to make observations you’d like to share or to shriek at us when we get something wrong. That’s what it’s there for. Check out the broadcasts at local theaters Perimeter Pointe, Buckhead Fork and Screen, and Chamblee Hollywood 24. For a complete schedule and list of theaters, visit the Met.
TAGS: THE MET LIVE IN HD, PETER GELB, JAMES LEVINE, ANNA NETREBKO
