FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Turandot
The management team at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, have really been working hard this year to bring their productions to a wider audience. In association with BP, live operatic shows have been broadcast around the country to big screens in various popular locations, including the one I went to last night, in Leeds' Millennium Square.
Other places where these programmes have been shown live, with subtitles, and absolutely free-of-charge to any visitor are Aberdeen, London's Canary Wharf, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Birmingham, Bradford, Plymouth, Rotherham, Tower Hamlets, Ipswich and Bowness-on-Windermere!
So, really, double-congratulations are in order to the ROH: firstly for continuing to put on first-rate productions of some of the most famous and best loved operatic repertoire as well as newer, less-celebrated works, and secondly for working so hard to bring these shows to the public via today's breathtaking technology.
And, last night's show really was something special. Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the whole 2h 30m of it but the part I saw and heard of Puccini's Turandot was done wonderfully well. The brilliant colours and textures of the orchestral soundscape could even be appreciated by the remote listener some 200 miles away from where the action was taking place, thanks to the efforts of a crew that had done an outstanding job of capturing and broadcasting these things in crystal clear quality. Truly a professional job.
Well done ROH for providing the show, and to BP and all the borough councils who arranged for their screens to display it.
Other places where these programmes have been shown live, with subtitles, and absolutely free-of-charge to any visitor are Aberdeen, London's Canary Wharf, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Birmingham, Bradford, Plymouth, Rotherham, Tower Hamlets, Ipswich and Bowness-on-Windermere!
So, really, double-congratulations are in order to the ROH: firstly for continuing to put on first-rate productions of some of the most famous and best loved operatic repertoire as well as newer, less-celebrated works, and secondly for working so hard to bring these shows to the public via today's breathtaking technology.
And, last night's show really was something special. Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the whole 2h 30m of it but the part I saw and heard of Puccini's Turandot was done wonderfully well. The brilliant colours and textures of the orchestral soundscape could even be appreciated by the remote listener some 200 miles away from where the action was taking place, thanks to the efforts of a crew that had done an outstanding job of capturing and broadcasting these things in crystal clear quality. Truly a professional job.
Well done ROH for providing the show, and to BP and all the borough councils who arranged for their screens to display it.
