Tristan and Isolde at The Met

Well Sunday's 5 hour epic opera - Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" was impressive.

Opera on this scale is something of a trial, even when it's being shown on a cinema screen. It was clearly too much of a trial for two elderly ladies, who decided partway through Act 1 to talk quite loudly about whether they should leave and if they did, who should go first. Extraordinary!

I keep being amazed at the number of older people who seem to have no idea of how to behave in public. Surely they weren't raised with that behaviour? I can only figure that they've spent so many years at home in front of the tellie chatting away that they've quite forgotten any old rules.

Musically the performance was top class. Deborah Voigt showed superb vocal acting and gave Isolde a real sense of Celtic power. It is a great feature of these broadcasts that one gets good coverage of the conductor and orchestra - usually they're just invisible in the pit - and with Wagner each act had a substantial dramatic interlude where we watched and heard a performance worthy in its own right.

However, two aspects of the event were disappointing.

One was the acting performance. While each singer acted out their emotions very well, there was almost no interaction between the title pair. For a long opera that is solely focussed on the intense love of two people it is barely credible that they almost never looked at each other. While this is partly due to the misfortune that beset this Met season - it was the 4th performance in a row with a different male lead - there still had to be a lack of stage direction at issue.

The other drawback was the attempt by the director to alleviate the visual sparseness of the opera by using multiple frames within the screen. While I understand her motive, as given in a live interview in the first interval, there were too many occasions where the audience was left watching a tiny portion of the High Definition screen with bunches of pixels for faces or when things were happening in full screen for that view to vanish while the frames were rearranged.

Now obviously doing this kind of thing live is a hard act to pull off, and you have to give The Met marks for trying, but in the end the effect detracted rather than added to a more ordinary approach.

Not that is stopped the Wagnerites in the audience from applauding at the end of each act. I don't really get the applause-in-the-cinema thing but I guess people like to express their feelings.

All in all, I enjoyed it and was glad I went and spent the time but it wasn't an experience I could recommend to non-devotees.

The next broadcast/delayed screening is La Boheme which should be more accessable.