Many traditional performing arts are embracing live HD satellite broadcasting and reaping the rewards, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
IT IS a Saturday evening at the Swan Cinema in Rathmines in Dublin, and something unusual is going on. As patrons arrive at Screen One, the screen is filled, not with film trailers but with with a live view of the bustling interior of New York’s Lincoln Center, home of that city’s famed Metropolitan Opera.
In New York, it is 1pm and audience members are heading to their seats for the matinee performance of the new opera season's spectacularly high-tech staging of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold.
The set includes a massive specially designed wall of steel planks that can be hand-cranked into various positions and upon which cast members, including Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, will be suspended at times by cables. He will walk vertically across its high-tech rainbow bridge to Valhalla at the end; the Rhinemaidens will swim, dangling across its surface at the start.
In Ireland, the audience comes dressed up as well as dressed down, many carrying popcorn and soft drinks. Each seat has a programme for the performance and the audience in Dublin is as expectant as that in New York. At 6pm, the lights in the cinema drop; on screen is soprano Deborah Voigt, host for the evening.
Backstage and live from New York – and only for the cinema audiences – she introduces the opera. As singers scurry past, she briefly interviews Terfel, in the full barbarian garb of his character Wotan, outside his dressing room.
Then, the camera jumps to the orchestra pit where conductor James Levine climbs on to his stool. The live audience hushes, the baton is raised and the first notes of the beautiful overture fill the theatre – at the Met and in stereo in hundreds of cinemas such as the Swan, worldwide. In Ireland, screens from Dublin to Galway to Tralee to Cork are filled with a gorgeously detailed, live, high-definition stereo satellite broadcast.
Thus begins the fifth season of the Met’s annual HD broadcasts. It is a multi-million dollar gamble to expand the audience for opera which, simultaneously, has pioneered the use of the world’s leading-edge broadcast technologies for one of the western world’s oldest and most formal art forms.
“They have spent a lot of money on it and their mission is to make it a global phenomenon,” says Niall Doyle, director of Opera Ireland, which partners the Met to present the HD broadcasts in Ireland.
On the arts side, it’s not just opera, but other very traditional performing art forms that are embracing live HD satellite broadcasts. Ballet companies such as Russia’s Bolshoi and Britain’s National Theatre are both organisations that have beamed HD performances around the world.
But, as Doyle notes, opera led the way.
“One of the most fascinating things is that opera is now the most advanced in using these new technologies. So what is sometimes seen as the most stuffy and fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned of art forms is right out at technology’s cutting edge. Rock is only now catching on.”
The goal of the Met with its HD broadcasts – and of partners such as Opera Ireland – is to show that opera actually isn’t stuffy or fuddy-duddy at all. The hope is to increase opera’s audience, which now easily has the oldest age profile for followers of any of the performing arts. Sexy new singers, though, and regular use of opera for advertisements and in film undoubtedly have upped awareness and interest too.
Curiously, despite the fact that rock bands often stage ultra-high-tech stage shows, rock is definitely the tentative newcomer to high-tech HD broadcast. For now, it seems to be just the big stadium bands with hardcore followers that are willing to try HD. Bon Jovi, for example, can be seen live in HD on November 11th at the Dundrum centre cinema in Dublin, which also is carrying the National Theatre’s current HD season.
Doyle, however, thinks that as record sales dry up, bands will increasingly turn to a shared live broadcast performance to replace lost income. Bands may stage fewer live performances, but broadcast them live to a larger audience than they get for live tours.
He says that as Irish cinemas have gradually acquired the technology needed for HD broadcasts – special projectors and satellite links – they are increasingly eager to get broadcasts of all kinds for audiences, not least as HD tickets can be sold at a premium, higher than cinema seats but lower than an actual performance ticket.
For opera, HD broadcasts aren’t just PR exercises but are profitable. The Met’s general manager Peter Gelb, who came up with the idea of the live HD broadcasts five seasons ago, has said that 2.4 million tickets were sold for the 2009 season broadcasts, bringing in an extra $8 million (€5.7 million) in profit to help toward’s the Met’s mammoth $300 million annual operating budget.
The Met has also said that since broadcasts began in 2006, an additional 7,000 donors have signed up to give towards Met productions.
Doyle says the broadcasts have been modestly but helpfully profitable for Opera Ireland as well. He is certain that the Met HD broadcasts have helped to expand audiences for Opera Ireland productions.
“We’re having the best live opera ticket sales in the last 10 years now, and demand is so strong that we are putting on an additional performance [of Tosca, Opera Ireland’s upcoming opera]. I’m convinced we’re getting people who have been to the HD series and want to now see live opera.”
High definition: how opera does it
THE COSTLY decision to broadcast opera live using high-definition (HD) technology is the brainchild the New York Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, Peter Gelb.
The broadcast itself is a highly complex operation involving more than 70 people, including sound technicians, cameramen and engineers as well as schedule managers.
The Met uses at least 10 high-definition cameras mounted throughout the opera house to capture its live HD broadcast, beamed by satellite to cinemas and theatres in more than 40 countries, including theatres across Ireland.
Many cameras are remotely operated, such as a robotic HD unit that runs on tracks across the front of the stage for close-ups and panning shots. Others are mounted in the first tier boxes or are operated backstage.
For the sound, microphones are mounted at the front lip of the stage. The live stereo mix is fed out to a production truck sitting outside the opera house on Amsterdam Avenue and converted to the desired format for broadcast.
Cinemas taking the broadcast must have special equipment to show an HD broadcast, including the ability to take a live satellite feed. Because the broadcasts are live, they are subject to occasional glitches. Perhaps the most unusual so far occurred during the opening performance this season of Das Rheingold, when the broadcast was delayed 15 minutes at many US venues due to interference caused by solar flares.
For a detailed interview on how the sound is prepared, see http://tinyurl.com/2c8xrnt
The next in the current Met HD series is Donizetti's Don Pasqualeon November 13th, which will be screened live at 6pm in cinemas across Ireland (see Operaireland.ie for more information).
