Like a true prima donna, Karita Mattila only gave a few pithy remarks to the reporters outside her dressing room door as she walked to the stage to star in the Metropolitan Opera's production of "Salome" last Saturday.
A Hanover audience assembled in the Loew Theater and viewers all around the world followed Mattila backstage thanks to the Met's Live in HD program, which broadcasts operas in high definition from New York.
For the second consecutive year, Sydney Stowe, manager of film at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, has been the leading force in bringing the series to Dartmouth. In an interview with The Dartmouth, she urged more students to attend, calling this "a great way to try opera."
Stowe, who hopes the series will continue for many years to come, described Live in HD's special features.
"During the intermission, they show you really cool content," Stowe said.
"They show how the backdrops and scenery is arranged. There was a really great opening piece on the jewelry in the show ... Because the images are in HD, the picture is incredible. It's like you can see the makeup on their faces," she said.
Stowe has fought hard to provide more affordable access to live opera. Tickets to the screenings in Lowe, like all performances at the Hopkins Center, are five dollars for students. After almost all of last year's performances sold out, the Hopkins Center added an encore presentation for each of the shows airing this year.
This fall, four operas will be broadcast at the Loew, which is equipped with a high-definition projector and surround sound. The winter and spring lineup offers a variety of performance styles, ranging from traditional stagings to cutting-edge adaptations in various languages. English subtitles will stream during every broadcast.
The season opened with Richard Strauss' "Salome" on Saturday, Oct. 11 and Sunday, Oct. 12. This inaugural opera explored themes of incest and necrophilia in a production that Stowe called "intense and dark."
The Met's rendition of "Salome" moved the story away from its Biblical roots and onto the set of "Casablanca." King Herod's guards look like World War II troops in Africa while the women appear in 1940s gowns.
In the famous "Dance of the Seven Veils," Mattila wore what The New York Times described as the "7 Vanishing Veils." The costume designer interpreted the seven veils as articles of clothing so that Mattila gradually stripped off a pantsuit that was strikingly similar to those worn by Ingrid Bergman.
Upcoming performances in the series demonstrate the wide range of styles within the world of contemporary opera. The programming lineup shifts from the classic to avant garde with John Adams' "Doctor Atomic," first performed by the San Francisco Opera in 2005.
The real protagonist in this grim and dimly lit modernist opera is the atomic bomb that hovers over the stage as a chorus of townspeople express their increasing anxiety about testing the nuclear weapon.
For those who have never experienced opera before, "Doctor Atomic," although experimental, is the most accessible show this season thanks to its English-language libretto.
"La Damnation de Faust" by Robert Berlioz is an adaptation of Goethe's original story of a man who sells his soul to the devil. Berlioz's "Faust" will be broadcast at the Loew on Nov. 22 and 23 at 1 p.m.
Director Robert Lepage plans to revive this well-known story of the battle between good and evil with new artistic and technological adaptations. We can only speculate what delights Lepage has in store, but the Met raised the bar for creative opera stagings when it used giant puppets and a cast on the scale of the Beijing Olympics in Mozart's "The Magic Flute" last season.
Most Dartmouth students will be off campus when the next opera, "Thais," plays at the Loew on Saturday, Dec. 20, at 12 p.m. and Sunday, Dec. 21, at 1p.m.
The legendary Renee Fleming has turned this year's opera lineup into a celebration of her signature roles. Fleming will join the elite Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo when she becomes the third opera singer honored at the Met's "Opening Night Gala."
A coveted model of haute couture, Fleming was featured in October 2008's Vogue magazine, which called her "The most prominent and celebrated soprano of the new century."
Fleming will wear Christian Lacroix for this performance of "Thais," and later in the season she will don the designs of Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel and John Galliano for Christian Dior.
The next Live in HD opera is "Doctor Atomic," which airs Saturday, Nov. 8 and Sunday, Nov. 9 at 1 p.m. in the Loew Theater.
