LONDON (Reuters) ? It won't be as steamy as "The Tudors," but one thing audiences for the Metropolitan Opera's live cinema broadcast of Donizetti's "Anna Bolena" on Saturday can count on is Russian diva Anna Netrebko, as the doomed queen, will lose her head.
The Met kicks off the sixth season of its live-to-movie-theater transmissions with a house premiere of the Bergamo, Italy composer's first big operatic success from 1830, a three-hour-long romanticized take on the intrigues in Tudor King Henry VIII's court that led to Anne Boleyn's beheading in 1536.
It is a bel canto (Italian for "beautiful singing") masterpiece that somehow got overlooked at the Met -- in large part probably because former longtime general manager Rudolf Bing thought it was an "old bore."
Under current general manager Peter Gelb it gets five-star treatment, from Netrebko and the supporting cast to enlisting Scottish producer David McVicar to pull it all together.
The opening night reviews were decidedly mixed, with some suggesting the mostly lyric soprano Netrebko isn't fit for purpose in the light, airy world of bel canto, while others say Bing was right.
But pretty much everyone agreed the production ends with a show stopper as Netrebko is elevated onto the stage in her Tower of London prison for one of those searing mad scenes in which Donizetti specialized, before she gets the chop.
"The critics represent a very small proportion of the audience," an unruffled Gelb told Reuters in a telephone interview from New York last week.
"The run is completely sold out, the audience has given wild, standing ovations to Miss Netrebko and the other performers, and they love it."
This season, the Met Live high-definition broadcasts are being beamed to 54 countries, with Russia, Israel and China the latest to sign up, almost guaranteeing to break the record of 2.6 million tickets sold at movie-theater box offices last year.
Gelb, who initiated the broadcasts, said audiences for them more than triple the 800,000 who attend in the opera house, and the sales add a cool $17 million to the Met's bottom line.
The broadcasts have revolutionized the way opera companies around the world operate, with many seeking to emulate the Met's success, while everyone from set designers to singers has realized they are "on camera."
"It's no longer the stage gestures made famous in (the Marx Brothers) 'Night at the Opera'," Gelb said. "An incredible acting performance in the opera house will also look good on camera."
Gelb said he never asks directors or designers to tailor the opera for the broadcast, but producer McVicar said inevitably things had to change on stage when cameras are trained on it.
"It is a tricky thing and it's a new thing and it's something we're all learning to manipulate," he said in an interview in London, following weeks of work in New York to get "Anna Bolena" off the ground.
"Productions were not previously meant to have the scrutiny of close-up camera in the way that we're doing it now, but now it's a requirement."
McVicar said fans of "The Tudors," which he said seems to be even more popular in the United States than it is in Britain, might be surprised by the sets, which some American critics have described as spare, or that the costumes don't look like what they see in the television series.
"Lots of Americans have said it's very spare and it's absolutely not. It is very, very true to history, as are the costumes that are accurate down to the 'nth' degree," he said, noting that in King Henry's day, rooms rarely were furnished with anything more than a chair or two, or a table and benches.
"What we wanted to do was get away from that terrible opera shorthand for the 16th century where the clothes are not constructed properly, where it's regarded as 'Oh, it's just a costume with big sleeves and a singlet at the back'."
The costumes, by designer Jenny Tiramani, are constructed as they would have been in Tudor times, and are faithful to garments that appear in paintings by Henry VIII's court painter, Hans Holbein, McVicar said.
Above all, though, he's certain the final mad scene, with Netrebko, is a knockout.
"I just plunk her down at the front of the stage on her knees and she just sings it. I don't ask her to do anything else because the music doesn't require anything else, because this is where bel canto opera works.
"You've earned it, you've done the rest of the drama kind of like white hot, you earn the moment to sit down for five minutes and just sing beautifully."
(The Met: Live in HD broadcast of Donizetti's "Anna Bolena" takes place on Saturday, Oct 15 www.metopera.org/hdlive)
(Editing by Paul Casciato)
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