Metropolitan Opera's live broadcast of Gioachino Rossini's
Il Barbiere di Siviglia at Bella Botega Cinemas in Redmond

MET AT THE MOVIES: Saturday, March 24 1:30pm - Bartlett Sher (The Light in the Piazza) makes his Met debut directing this new production of Rossini’s subversive comedy. Heading the cast are the world’s leading Rossini tenor Juan Diego Flórez, sensational mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato, and magnetic baritone Peter Mattei. Maurizio Benini conducts.

As my early birthday present, today we enjoyed a live broadcast of Metropolitan Opera's new production of Rossini's hilarious comedic opera The Barber of Seville (Il Barbiere di Siviglia), directed by an acclaimed theater director Bartlett Sher (of Seattle's INTIMAN Theatre) and his Tony Award-winning team from The Light in the Piazza.

As Galvin Borchert writes in the Seattle Weekly, New York City's Metropolitan Opera has been broadcasting its Saturday afternoon performances live around the world via radio since the '30s, and on PBS since the '70s, but only recently has the technology developed to allow broadcasts on a scale more appropriate to the Met's grandeur - the big screen. We certainly agree with his impression that the sound quality and the crisp high-definition images left little to be desired, as did the skillfully managed camera translations from a distant three-dimensional experience to an often larger-than-life two-dimensional one. Of course, as Galvin also points out, opera was never meant to be an art of close-ups but an art of projection - of a human voice and the emotions it bears arcing into space, and even a state-of-the-art screen and sound system can't reproduce the feeling a listener gets from a live voice soaring, filling a hall, enveloping everyone in their seats, a feeling we remember well from our last of many live and in person experiences at the Met last spring, a colossal production of Verdi's Aida.