I’m not even sure whether to praise the Metropolitan Opera or criticize them. They have a new production of Le Nozze di Figaro, and this year they are showing it exactly once in a live broadcast on April 26 and exactly once in a recording on April 30, and only in select theaters worldwide. They offer recordings for a fee, but never from the current season—well, for obvious reasons. So, Figaro will only be added to their library next year.
Our local cinema failed the live broadcast—they apologized, sent us home, and promised a refund. Four days later, a recorded session was shown in the same theater. That went almost smoothly, if you ignore the severe sound issues during the first 30 minutes. Since I can’t tell if both were issues with the specific theater or poor organization by the Met, I dropped them a support line just in case.
And support apologized on behalf of the theater and, as a nice bonus, sent me a link to a video 1280 × 720, 3h37m, asking me to watch it by Monday because after that the carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Well, okay, not quite an mp3 file, but it streams via m3u8, and yt-dlp manages to convert it into a 6-gigabyte mp4 file in 3 minutes.
Interestingly, this recording starts with the opera artists singing the Ukrainian anthem on stage before the curtain is even raised. This introduction was not shown at the cinema.
I am honest, and of course, I won’t give the file to anyone. I will watch it myself when convenient, and then I may delete it, or might keep it on my personal laptop for personal use. And I might even buy a subscription to the Met this weekend. In short, they’ve done well, though, there is a small nuance 🙂
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 