10 #ROHdonna thoughts

27th May 2013

I have spent the evening in the front row of Screen 4 at Clapham Picturehouse watching the Royal Opera House live broadcast of Rossini’s La donna del lago. I thought it truly splendid, and the best ROH broadcast that I have seen to date. By way of instant reactions, across the jump are 10 immediate observations and thoughts.

1. Since the advertised start time was 18.45 I was disappointed that we could not go into the auditorium until 18.42 – and that we then waited at least 7 or 8 minutes for the broadcast to start.

2. The ROH presentation was ‘cool’ and distanced, with minimal excitement and little sense that this was a live event. The opening links by tonight’s star Joyce DiDonato were clearly pre-recorded, which felt unadventurous. Metropolitan Opera Live in HD does all this stuff so much better.

3. The film before Act I was simple and succinct and it provided all you needed to know about the plot and John Fulljames’ moderately eccentric but effective and intelligent production.

4. The subtitles were missing from the opening of the first chorus and then – oddly, to my eyes – ran through the interval feature.

5. The images and audio from the production itself were absolutely splendid – which allowed the glorious singing to come through brilliantly; brava in particular to Daniella Barcellona in the ‘kilt’ role, but DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez were also in fine voice.

6. Clearly Rossini can be a much darker composer than I had imagined – I could become a fan.

7. In the interval the ROH showed a short extract from a Joyce DiDonato masterclass with a young woman singing a Rossini aria – this was fine as it went, but it felt disconnected from the opera we were watching and I would have much preferred more context and analysis. ROH Live earlier this year presented a fascinating model showing for the production, which I have embedded below – a cutdown of this would have been far more interesting.

8. Tweets with the hashtag from the headline were displayed on screen during the interval – a nice touch; they were also shown, rather half-heartedly, during the closing credits.

9. As several Twitter contributors pointed out, the ‘rape’ scene in Act I was significantly on the wrong side of tasteless.

10. ‘Diverse’ is not the word you would use to describe the audience at Clapham Picturehouse – they were white, middle-aged (and more) and middle-class, and that most definitely includes me! Wonderful as ROH Cinema is, it’s hard to make the case, on the evidence from SW4, that it is bringing a new, younger and less homogenous audience to opera.

Next up from ROH Cinema is Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, to be screened on June 24. The opera is one that is very close to my heart, having produced the BBC film of Phyllida Lloyd’s production with Opera North. The new ROH presentation, directed by Richard Jones, is a co-production with State Opera Hamburg and you can get a sense of it from this German report (with a delightfully earnest voice-over).