With tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s performance on Sunday, the Metropolitan Opera launched Met Stars Live in Concert, a recital series featuring the company’s most popular singers livestreamed from around the world.
By Heidi Waleson
Among performing arts organizations, the Metropolitan Opera is in both the worst and the best position right now with respect to the pandemic shutdown. Its $300 million budget and 3,000 employees made it too large to get funds from the Paycheck Protection Program; its loss of earned income from cancelled performances from mid-March through the end of 2020 is estimated at $100 million; the company has furloughed its artists and much of its administrative staff in order to stay afloat. However, a sophisticated media operation, honed over 14 years of HD transmissions into movie theaters worldwide, has enabled the Met to remain firmly in the public eye, and even to extend its reach. Free daily online streams, drawn from the 200-plus videos in its archive, with performances reaching back to the Pavarotti “La Bohème” of 1977, drew an average of 250,000 viewers each night in the first months of the shutdown (that number is now closer to 100,000); its live, four-hour gala in April tallied 750,000 viewers. Streaming has produced some revenue—subscriptions to the Met Opera on Demand service have more than doubled, to 34,000—and helped to drive special fundraising. It has also made new friends for the Met. General manager Peter Gelb says that there are 140,000 new names in the company’s database and 30,000 new donors; he has anecdotal accounts of people who discovered opera through the program.
The Met has now harnessed its media operation for a new revenue-generating project. Met Stars Live in Concert was launched on Saturday, with tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing from Polling Abbey outside Munich. Sixteen of the Met’s most popular singers (all but two are sopranos and tenors) are being showcased in 12 live concerts, one every two weeks (all but one air on Saturdays at 1 p.m. EDT). Unlike the at-home, ad hoc renditions of the gala, with their handmade, iPhone production values, these concerts are being staged in unusual venues, mostly in Europe, with professional camera work, sound and lighting, directed from New York by Gary Halvorson, who helms the Met: Live in HD shows. They are offered as pay-per-view, at $20 per concert; each is available for 12 days after the live airing to purchasers for as many viewings as they wish.
Mr. Gelb urged the singers to choose familiar repertoire, and Mr. Kaufmann obliged with a program of blockbuster Italian and French arias from the likes of “Tosca” and “Carmen,” and the hit tune “Nessun dorma” from “Turandot.” As a result, the program came across like a steeplechase, with Mr. Kaufmann alternating between pouring on the power and throttling back for a bit of respite. His handsome, burnished tenor was always exciting at full tilt; softer moments sometimes sounded monochromatic. The full-throated Italian arias suited him best; those that engaged his theatrical storytelling skills, such as “Un di, all’azzurro spazio,” from Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier, ” were mesmerizing.
Production values were high, and if the camera work was sometimes overly busy—too many closeups that had us staring down his throat—the pillared, two story space, with its 18th-century ceiling paintings and creamy lighting, felt airy and acoustically friendly. The sound of both singer and pianist, the excellent Helmut Deutsch, was sensitive and authentic. My home setup—a MacBook Pro connected to an HD TV via an HDMI cable, with sound run through high-end stereo speakers via a digital audio converter—produced video as good as a movie theater; the sound was probably better.
Mr. Kaufmann needed breaks in this hefty program, so the live arias were interspersed with video excerpts from staged operas, charmingly introduced by soprano Christine Goerke from the New York control room, and intermezzos from “Manon Lescaut” and “Pagliacci” elegantly performed on piano by Mr. Deutsch. The videos were a striking reminder that the stage is Mr. Kaufmann’s element, whether as the desperate young Werther (at the Met in 2014) or, in a completely different vein, a terrifying Canio in “Pagliacci” (at Salzburg in 2015).
The rest of the series offers plenty to look forward to. Next up is soprano Renée Fleming (Aug. 1) at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, performing songs and arias including—from one of her signature roles—the Marschallin’s “Da geht er hin.” Roberto Alagna and Aleksandra Kurzak (Aug. 16, the only Sunday concert) will sing from an outdoor terrace overlooking the Mediterranean in Èze, France; their antics in the gala advertised their enjoyment of playful duets. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing the young Norwegian dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen (Aug. 29), who made her Met debut in the fall in “The Queen of Spades.” A major talent with an opulent sound and a huge range, she will offer some of her calling card repertoire, such as “Tannhauser” (her Bayreuth debut this past summer) as well as some Scandinavian songs, at a castle in Oslo.
Repertoire for the later concerts has not yet been announced, but the singer lineup is lively. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato (Sept. 12), who played a turbulent Agrippina just before the Met closed down, sings from Barcelona; another soprano-tenor pairing features bel canto superstars Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena (Nov. 7) in Switzerland, who made a scintillating couple in “La fille du régiment” at the Met last year; bass-baritone Bryn Terfel (Dec. 12), absent for too long from the Met, is doing a holiday program from Wales; and rising star Angel Blue (Dec. 19) will finish the series from New York.
As of Tuesday morning, about 27,000 people had bought tickets for Mr. Kaufmann’s concert, with nine days of availability remaining, and advance sales for the others were at 34,000. Pay-per-view is uncharted territory for the Met. Mr. Gelb expects that the series will break even (some of the costs are covered by sponsors) and hopes that it will do better than that. Still, he points out, “the pay-per-view series is a fiscal Band-Aid.” “It has artistic merit, and it helps fill the emotional hole that the opera company, the singers and the audience would like to fill, but bigger challenges lie ahead.”
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan)..
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