Manager Peter Gelb is leading the way in attracting a new, younger audience to New York's Metropolitan Opera, but at what cost?
In Peter Gelb's office at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, there's a screen that's flush with the wall so it resembles a window. It captures whatever is happening on the Met's stage – so its general manager's eye can be trained on rehearsals and performances all day long. When I visit, the set of Philip Glass's Satyagraha is being taken down, to be replaced, a little later, by that of Don Giovanni (both productions have British directors, to whom we will return).
It is appropriate that Gelb's eye on his operatic kingdom is via a screen, for cinema has become the company's boom area. Gelb claims it will reap $10m–$12m (£6.4m–£7.7m) net profit from this, its sixth season of live HD transmissions into cinemas. Donizetti...
In Peter Gelb's office at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, there's a screen that's flush with the wall so it resembles a window. It captures whatever is happening on the Met's stage – so its general manager's eye can be trained on rehearsals and performances all day long. When I visit, the set of Philip Glass's Satyagraha is being taken down, to be replaced, a little later, by that of Don Giovanni (both productions have British directors, to whom we will return).
It is appropriate that Gelb's eye on his operatic kingdom is via a screen, for cinema has become the company's boom area. Gelb claims it will reap $10m–$12m (£6.4m–£7.7m) net profit from this, its sixth season of live HD transmissions into cinemas. Donizetti...
- 12/9/2011
- by Charlotte Higgins
- The Guardian - Film News
If you love the Tintin books, don't see Steven Spielberg's 'execrable' film adaptation
I entered the plush Leicester Square auditorium for a screening of The Adventures of Tintin with low expectations and 3D glasses. Donning the latter and suppressing the former, I thought for a few pleasant minutes that my forbearance might be rewarded: the opening credit sequence, a zappy graphic medley in which cityscapes, crime scenes and villains morph into and out of one another, was excellent; and so was the first scene, which wittily showed Hergé himself (Tintin's creator, in case you didn't know) eking out a living by drawing caricatures in a flea-market, the array of his past clients featuring characters from all the Tintin books. From then on, though, it was downhill, and then some. Steven Spielberg's adaptation is not just a failure; it is an assault on a great body of art so...
I entered the plush Leicester Square auditorium for a screening of The Adventures of Tintin with low expectations and 3D glasses. Donning the latter and suppressing the former, I thought for a few pleasant minutes that my forbearance might be rewarded: the opening credit sequence, a zappy graphic medley in which cityscapes, crime scenes and villains morph into and out of one another, was excellent; and so was the first scene, which wittily showed Hergé himself (Tintin's creator, in case you didn't know) eking out a living by drawing caricatures in a flea-market, the array of his past clients featuring characters from all the Tintin books. From then on, though, it was downhill, and then some. Steven Spielberg's adaptation is not just a failure; it is an assault on a great body of art so...
- 10/28/2011
- by Tom McCarthy
- The Guardian - Film News
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