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Opera is the ultimate combination of music and drama; and New York's Metropolitan Opera (Met) is one of the finest presenters of this complex, thrilling art.
In Mumbai, our appetites have been whetted by recent operatic productions mounted or imported by the National Centre of the Performing Arts (NCPA) and the Neemrana Foundation. But now we are able to watch truly world-class performances from the Metropolitan Opera, in their global initiative titled 'Live in HD'.
In this, select Saturday-afternoon performances are broadcast via satellite to several countries. And, to accommodate those in time-zones where the broadcast-time would be inconvenient, the entire performance is recorded and played-back later via a file saved on hard disk. Thus the screenings in India take place sometime after the original broadcast but offer an identical experience, complete with intermissions, and give fascinating glimpses into backstage preparation and change of scene. There are also interviews with singers and the creative crew which some opera-lovers would probably find interesting, though some might well say, ''Get on with it!''
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OTELLO and TEMPEST |
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The NCPA's Godrej Dance Academy Theatre is the venue for these screenings; and one wishes it were better suited. This auditorium is shaped like a horizontal shoe-box, with some of the audience seated to the far left and right of the centrally-located screen. Thus, if one is not close to the centre, one should be prepared to watch the video from an extreme angle.
Moreover, one should also be prepared for some serious anomalies in the sound, which would be dominated by the output from the speaker(s) to which one is closest. The audio configuration is 7.1, with side and rear speakers mounted on the appropriate walls; the centre-channel located (as it should be) behind the acoustically-transparent screen; and the musically all-important front left and right speakers placed on the extreme left and right of the WIDE stage, embedded in the proscenium behind perforated metal grilles.
Herein lays the rub. For the bulk of the orchestral sound comes from these speakers, whose positioning effectively splits the musicians in two. And the audio suffers from severely curtailed high frequencies, probably because the metal grilles block the tweeters and rob treble sounds of detail and impact. Sadly, this is made all the worse when one is seated in the centre, as then you are way ''off-axis'' from the left and right speakers, which dulls the treble still further.
To make things even more difficult, the Met recordings usually do not place singers' voices exclusively in the centre-channel; instead, a voice's placement in the soundscape is dependent on the singer's actual position onstage. Thus, voices often emanate from the extreme left or right, where the sound-quality is markedly inferior compared to when they are in the centre and reproduced by the correctly-mounted centre-channel speaker. This becomes glaringly obvious when a singer crosses the stage.
But what of the performances? Not everything from the Met is beyond reproach and the current season, presenting screenings of L'ELISIR D'AMORE and OTELLO so far, is no exception. Moreover, at least six of the twelve performances slated for broadcast are of old productions, some of which are available on DVD/Blu-ray or online with different, stellar casts. The new productions promise fresh insights; but whether they will actually deliver the goods musically and dramatically remains to be seen.
In sum, watching the Met at the NCPA 'Live in HD' is a mixed experience. It certainly affords a glimpse into the workings of a world-class opera-house and offers a reasonable facsimile of the real thing. One hopes, however, that the audio problems will be sorted-out. If not, people owning high-quality audio-video systems may well want to watch these performances at home.
Jiten S Merchant was the English drama critic for the Times of India (Mumbai) from 1989 to 1997, after which he free-lanced for the paper and on the Internet. He has worked in amateur and professional theatre as actor and sound-designer, and has directed and performed in staged play-readings. Currently, he is an accredited reviewer for Seen and Heard International, one of the oldest and most widely-read online purveyors of music-criticism, for whom he covers concerts of Western Classical music and Opera in Mumbai. His recent pieces are available on his blog: merchant-at-large.blogspot.in
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