Opera diva to film star, Fleming hits big screens

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. soprano Renee Fleming will have more than the Royal Opera House audience to worry about on Tuesday night.

Her performance in Verdi's "La Traviata" is being beamed live into 178 cinemas across Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as to 15 giant screens in England, Scotland and Wales, in the company's biggest foray yet into real-time cinema tie-ins.

The Royal Opera House, like other leading companies around the world, hopes movie theatres will attract new, younger audiences to an art form still seen by many as elitist and prohibitively expensive.

"It's enormously important, especially when you think that the most intense negativity about opera in recent years has been the cries of elitism based on the expense alone of the tickets," the 50-year-old Fleming said in a telephone interview.

"And when people can see the performance with terrific sound quality and feel as if they are in the theater, then that broadens the audience for opera, no question."

But Fleming also argued that the cost of staging opera was high, making high ticket prices necessary. It had also become more democratic over time, she added.

"Nobody wants to be called elitist. On the other hand, only 150 years ago classical music was entirely patron-subsidized and the audience was the court."

Balcony tickets to La Traviata at Covent Garden, home of the Royal Opera House, are advertised at 14-240 pounds ($23-$397). The production runs until July 6.

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Fleming, considered one of the world's leading sopranos whose portrayal of Violetta in La Traviata has been praised by British critics, said screen initiatives inevitably affected the way she performed.

"It's very difficult not to be connected to that," she said. "It used to be the radio broadcast, and every time there was one, one would feel more focused on the aural performance.

"With cinema and the large screens, there's no question that one is a little bit more conscious of the camera, which is closer than the house. The camera will pick up all kinds of subtleties the eye wouldn't pick up 20 yards away."

Fleming came to the role of doomed courtesan Violetta late in her career and initially tackled it with some trepidation.

"The trepidation (was) about the difficulty of the role, which is extreme, and also about fact that it has been sung by every great soprano in history," she said.

"It's a marker in a way, and a kind of yardstick of one's ability and requirements."