Although the NT Live also has some free live streaming, the cinemas in London are open for business next week and will be screening the films in cinemas.
Kickstart your opera weekend with Gounod’s sublime Roméo et Juliette (24 July), the world’s most famous love story comes to operatic life with superstars Anna Netrebko and Roberto Alagna playing the star-crossed young couple. The abandon and ardour of their performances brought audiences to their feet in both the opera house and in movie theatres. And the unique up-close-and-personal camerawork takes the viewer onstage to witness some of the production’s most memorable images and sultriest moments as never before. Every bit as heartbreaking and kinetic as the Shakespearean original, Gounod’s ravishing opera features the most famous moments of the play dressed up unforgettable musical finery. The star-crossed lovers at the centre are assigned no fewer than four duets; Romeo’s swashbuckling friend Mercutio gets the first-act showstopper about Queen Mab; and Juliet’s vivacious entrance aria is a waltz so irresistible, anyone would be compelled to scale a balcony for her.
All the humour of Boito’s libretto (taken from Shakespeare) is superbly brought to life by a cast of great singing actors in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production of Fallstaff (25 July). Paul Plishka is the lecherous, ageing, fat knight Falstaff. Marilyn Horne’s delicious Dame Quickly gets the best of him, with some help from Mirella Freni (Alice Ford) and Susan Graham (Meg Page) - both at the top of their game. An adorable Barbara Bonney and ardent Frank Lopardo are the young lovers. James Levine’s deft conducting brings out all the nuance of the quicksilver score. Verdi finished his sublime final opera when he was almost 80 years old, capping a fruitful career with a bawdy adaptation of scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV. His classic operatic farce charts a knight’s gold-digging efforts to seduce two married women, leading to belly-flopping failure on both counts. The score, meanwhile, is a complete tour de force, demonstrating the old master’s still-youthful panache, as well as his profound insight into human nature.
This production of Strauss’s most sumptuous work by director Nathaniel Merrill and designer Robert O’Hearn is almost as beloved as the opera Der Rosenkavalier (26 July) itself. It perfectly captures the glittering never-land of rococo Vienna the way the Viennese - and the rest of the world - wish it had been, and it’s the ideal setting for an adult comedy of love and errors. Susan Graham is the aristocratic young Octavian, torn between two women: Renée Fleming as the Marschallin, the mature woman who understands that one day Octavian must leave her; and Christine Schäfer as Sophie, the young girl who unexpectedly captures his heart. Kristinn Sigmundsson is the lecherous Baron Ochs who sets the whirling plot in motion, and Edo de Waart conducts. After scandalising the opera world with Salome and Elektra - a pair of stark, psychoanalytic portraits of biblical and ancient Greek heroines - Strauss composed this modern drawing-room comedy to great popular acclaim. The work, which follows the sexual indiscretions and romantic entanglements of several aristocratic characters, presents love, desire and nobility as distinctly double-sided coins: coming-of-age discovery vs the wisdom of ageing, and the thrill of pursuing new desires vs noble self-sacrifice for the greater good. The score draws on a rich orchestral palette that would come to define the composer’s mature work.
Though less familiar than Puccini’s greatest hits, the action-packed La Fanciulla del West (27 July) tribute to the American Wild West, which received its world premiere at the Met in 1910, is every bit as compelling. Its sweeping, evocative score deftly captures the feel of a Gold Rush-era mining camp - the perfect place for a sweet-talkin’ bandit to fall for a gun-totin’ bar owner with an enormous soprano voice and a heart of gold. In this transmission from the Met’s 2018/2019 Live in HD season, soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek gives a fearless performance as Minnie, the opera’s gun-toting heroine, who runs a saloon for a camp of rambunctious miners. Opposite Westbroek, tenor Jonas Kaufmann returned to the Met stage for the first time in nearly five years to sing Dick Johnson, the mysterious outlaw who wins Minnie’s heart despite his unsavoury past. Baritone Željko Lučić rounds out the principal trio as the vindictive sheriff Jack Rance, and Marco Armiliato conducts a vividly cinematic staging by Giancarlo del Monaco
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