Kate Molleson describes her experience of the English National Opera from a cinema in Glasgow. No, it wasn’t as powerful as the real thing, but using a music video director to mastermind the filming provided something vivid and immersive.
"The movie starts at about twenty past," says the guy at the box office, authoritatively. "Just a bunch of adverts until then." We ascend the eight flights of escalators, stock up on pick'n'mix and arrive at Screen 8 of Cineworld Glasgow with a couple of minutes to spare before 3pm. The feed to London's Coliseum is already up and running. It's a bit glitchy: definitely live, not adverts. The cameras pan across the well-heeled audience taking their seats, the orchestra tuning up and the chorus chattering in the wings. Bang on the hour the house lights in London dim – ours take a few minutes to follow suit – and we're off, plunged into the seething tensions of 1940s small-town Suffolk. A trickle of mis-informed advert-averse viewers wander in at twenty past, the cinema is a little over half full.
English National Opera's new venture into live-screened opera has attracted industry hype for several reasons. It was less than two years ago that ENO's artistic director John Berry claimed not to be interested in such endeavours: they don't create new audiences, he said, and "putting work out into the cinema can distract from making amazing quality work". The company explained their about-face in December by announcing a fresh take on screened opera, promising rock 'n' roll camera angles, HD hyper-realism and a degree of intimacy and immersion that existing screenings from, say, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne or the Met don't tend to offer... (Click here to read more)
"The movie starts at about twenty past," says the guy at the box office, authoritatively. "Just a bunch of adverts until then." We ascend the eight flights of escalators, stock up on pick'n'mix and arrive at Screen 8 of Cineworld Glasgow with a couple of minutes to spare before 3pm. The feed to London's Coliseum is already up and running. It's a bit glitchy: definitely live, not adverts. The cameras pan across the well-heeled audience taking their seats, the orchestra tuning up and the chorus chattering in the wings. Bang on the hour the house lights in London dim – ours take a few minutes to follow suit – and we're off, plunged into the seething tensions of 1940s small-town Suffolk. A trickle of mis-informed advert-averse viewers wander in at twenty past, the cinema is a little over half full.
English National Opera's new venture into live-screened opera has attracted industry hype for several reasons. It was less than two years ago that ENO's artistic director John Berry claimed not to be interested in such endeavours: they don't create new audiences, he said, and "putting work out into the cinema can distract from making amazing quality work". The company explained their about-face in December by announcing a fresh take on screened opera, promising rock 'n' roll camera angles, HD hyper-realism and a degree of intimacy and immersion that existing screenings from, say, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne or the Met don't tend to offer... (Click here to read more)