Das Rheingold. Lepage’s staging at the Met overpowers the performers.
(photo by : Richard Termine/The New York Times)
Watching the opera beamed in live is an exhilarating experience simply because we are thrust on stage with the camera and the view is spectacular. e get huge close-ups of the faces. We hear their voices perfectly, (which apparently was not the case in the theatre itself where we heard the Met audience booing tenor Richard Croft because he could barely be heard. We had no trouble hearing him in the Coliseum and in fact his voice, and that of baritone Eric Owens, were the most dramatic performances of the evening. James Levine’s majestic reading of Wagner created a lot of excitement as well and the technology of HD was the perfect venue for Wagner’s music.