But “being able to play to audiences across the globe” is also vital, says Beard. The expansion into cinemas across the UK is therefore an important aspect of their public service remit.
The Royal Opera and Ballet are institutions with national accountability, benefitting from generous public subsidies. You can see it in the interval tweets, in the social media: you really get a sense of being part of an extraordinary moment.” “It’s emphatically not a substitute for being there, when the atoms the singers are expelling enter your ears, but it is another way in to these remarkable art forms. “It is an extraordinary, wonderful complement to the experience of seeing opera and ballet live,” says the CEO of the Royal Opera House, Alex Beard. ‘Event cinema’, as it is being dubbed, is now worth an estimated £15m ($23m) in the UK alone and shows no sign of abating. This year, the number of live opera, ballet and theatre productions that will be available to global cinema audiences is bigger than ever, with two million Britons expected to partake.
Last season, I was tickled to learn, the Royal Ballet’s live cinema relay of Tchaikovsky’s seasonal favourite The Nutcracker beat the James Bond movie Skyfall at the cinema box-office, and came second only to The Hobbit. And they are also proving to be a welcome revenue stream for cash-strapped independent cinema chains, who not only gain considerable cultural cachet from showing quality art productions but benefit from both higher ticket prices (a ticket to an opera screening costs around $18-25, pricier than a Hollywood movie) and from attracting considerable audiences mid-week, when the cinema might otherwise be empty. Without compromising on sound or visual quality – the pictures and sound are gloriously crisp– they offer a far more relaxed and informal way to enjoy arts often viewed as impenetrably fancy: Puccini with popcorn, if you like, or Jenufa in jeans. For a fraction of the price of a ‘real’ ticket, they allow millions of people who ordinarily would have neither the geographic proximity nor financial resources to go to the opera, theatre or ballet to enjoy a ringside seat at sumptuous, world-class productions. Enabled through breathtakingly complex digital technology, these digital cinematic streams – or ‘simulcasts’, as the Met prefers – are described by the opera house as a ‘revolution’.
0 kommentar(er)
