Opera – it’s fun if you let it be

The drama, the tragedy, the divas with big hair and even bigger voices. Opera may be larger-than-life, but that's not to say it's all warbling Brunhildes. The Metropolitan opera house, New York, presents opera at its sleekest and sexiest, chock-full of the best international singers, staged by award-winning directors, and since December 2006, brought 'live in HD' to a cinema near you. Now in its sixth season, The Met: Live in HD is an award-winning series of operas transmitted via satellite to venues across the globe, including our very own cinema at St James Cavalier, Valletta.

Great for opera-lovers, opera novices, as well as those seeking to educate themselves about this wondrous art-form. Opportunities for such exposure are scarce locally: productions are all-too-rare gems - strange when one recalls the thriving opera culture that surrounded the 'Old Opera House' in Valletta, which staged sixteen operas in its opening season alone.

Nevertheless, the 2011-2012 season at the Met, now drawing to a close, has certainly offered the local opera-goer plenty of variety: eleven operas in total, seven of which were new productions, ranging from the Baroque in Handel's Rodelina, to the Classical in Mozart's Don Giovanni, and the Twentieth-Century in Philip Glass's Satyagraha.

Such 'world-class' operas feature some top singers, such as Joyce Di Donato, who recently won the Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Solo, as well as our own Joseph Calleja, also nominated for a Grammy this year, now in his sixth year at the Met, having performed the title role in Gounod's Faust , a staple of the Met's repertoire, only last month.

The Met is geared towards cultivating an ever-widening audience, attempting to make what is hardly fodder for the 'sound-bite generation' - operas are sometimes up to four hours long, and rarely in English - that tiny bit more accessible, providing an informative programme, subtitles in English and, in a rather E-Entertainment turn, live interviews with the stars as they stagger off-stage.

Not to everyone's taste perhaps, but it does serve to remind us that what has come to be thought of as strictly 'high-brow' - and is unquestionably an art of the highest perfection - is at its core also about pure entertainment, a dichotomy that has always been essential to opera's make-up.  Having its beginnings in the spectacular festivities of Renaissance courts, early operas were grand entertainments, while baroque opera houses, no longer under the patronage of the nobility, drew audiences by way of the highly popular stars that they employed.

The problem of how to keep a contemporary 'young' audience entertained while exposing it to great musical works was tackled by the Met earlier this year, via their production of The Enchanted Island,  described by the Met's general manager as opera "with a faster dramatic rhythm tailored to modern attention spans".

The Enchanted Island is advertised both as a 'baroque pastiche' and contemporary 'mash-up', though leans towards the latter. It is a barqoue extravaganza, a giant melting pot into which liberal amounts of  Handel, Vivaldi and Rameau are thrown, alongside all the magic of baroque stage wizardry (though now computerised), with a plot combining Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The outcome is a strange Disney-Panto set to some of the most marvellous arias of the Baroque. Not one for the purists; yet Placido Domingo strutting his stuff as a rather overweight Neptune, mermaids suspended mid-air, and a beautiful French Masque truly make for a very entertaining evening indeed.

Still to come in this year's programme are a number of matinees specially geared towards students, with tickets at very reasonable prices, including transmissions of Handel's Rodelinda, The Enchanted Island, Gounod's Faust and Verdi's La Traviata in February and March.