A little late blogging about this one, but last week I popped down to the Cinema de Lux in Bristol. That's a pretty rare event in itself: give me the smaller screens, and, admittedly hit and miss, 'arty' films of the Watershed over the popcorn-fuelled audiences and Hollywood blockbusters of Cabot Circus any day. Apart from, I've discovered, a handful of Saturdays this spring when the cavernous spaces and football-pitch sized screens are transformed into surrogate opera houses, in which case, count me in.
The Met Opera House from New York has been broadcasting its productions live to cinemas around the UK for a good while now, but I've been a bit slow on the uptake. Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, starring Plácido Domingo and Susan Graham as the seemingly doomed brother and sister, was my first taste of it. I'll be going back for more.
'Short of fainting I could not have been more moved than when I saw a performance of Gluck’s masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride,' wrote Berlioz. Fainting wasn't on my agenda, but Gluck's piece, written for the Paris Opera, is a gripping tale, which from the outset seems for a tragic ending.
To give you an idea, Iphigénie is obliged to sacrifice any strangers landing on the island of Tauride. Her brother Oreste, who she hasn't seen for 15 years and doesn't recognise, pitches up with a friend after being shipwrecked. You see where this is going… Oh, and the backstory is that their father was murdered by their mother, so Oreste killed their mother in order to avenge his father's death. It's not a cheery tale. Although, without wanting to give the ending away, I will say I wouldn't bother with the deluxe box of kleenex…
No comments:
Post a Comment