High-end culture at the movies returns on Friday with the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Das Rheingold, filmed in performance and scheduled for a week’s outing at Cinema Nouveau theatres countrywide.
The first in Wagner’s Ring Cycle launches Ster-Kinekor’s fourth opera season, which includes all 12 operas the Met has filmed in performance, ending in June next year (with Die Walküre, more of the Ring Cycle).
At the same time plays filmed in performance, most of them at the National Theatre in London, will be shown at Cinema Nouveau theatres every few months, courtesy of NT Live. The first one, on Saturday November 6, is the award-winning A Disappearing Number, devised by the British experimental theatre company Complicité and directed by Simon McBurney.
Meanwhile, back at the Met, Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel gives what reviewers have praised as a chilling, brutal portray of Wotan, but the star of Das Rheingold appears to be the set — ‘a feat of technological wizardry”, according to the New York Times, failing only at the end when the bridge to Valhalla doesn’t materialise and the gods just wander off the stage.
Next up, on November 19, is Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, with German bass René Pape as the guilt-ridden Russian tsar. It is followed on December 10 by a more cheerful offering, Donizetti’s comic opera, Don Pasquale, starring soprano Anna Netrebko.
Filmed operas had a bit of a slow start in a South Africa more interested in musical plays in English. But, says Ster Kinekor’s Raksha Singh: ‘Opera attendances have been on the increase from season to season and there has been a growing demand.”
It is a trend internationally, she says, for cinemas to ‘expand their content offerings beyond just standard cinema fare, to also include other theatrical or live experiences”.
‘We hope that by exhibiting these live operas fresh from the Met stages in New York that the culture and growth of a local opera culture may be inspired and developed.”
Some operas draw more patrons to the cinema than others — Madama Butterfly, Carmen and Lucia di Lammermoor are crowd-pullers. With that in mind, much of this year’s season presents a challenge to the casual moviegoer. But Donizetti’s Lucia is back, with Natalie Dessay and Joseph Calleja; there will be a week of Verdi’s Il Trovatore; and Renée Fleming fans, who are legion, will be able to see her in Richard Strauss’s Capriccio.
The play, A Disappearing Number, focuses on the friendship of mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and Cambridge don GH Hardy, a collaboration that led, eventually, to string theory. Among other plays to be screened are the award-winning Fela!, which explores the world of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, King Lear with Derek Jacobi, and a new Frankenstein, directed by Danny Boyle.