PORT ANGELES — We’re in Paris. Violetta Valéry, a courtesan who’s led a restless life, meets a fellow named Alfredo Germont. They’re at a party together, and she soon learns that he’s been fascinated by her for quite some time. The party guests, meanwhile, consider him a naive romantic.
Let’s hear you give a toast, they say to Alfredo.
He steps right up with a speech celebrating true love. Violetta, for her part, answers by praising free love. Still, she’s moved by this man’s openness.
Suddenly, Violetta feels faint. The guests pull away, leaving only Alfredo. He declares his love in song because, after all, this is Verdi’s opera “La Traviata,” presented live in Port Angeles.
“We’re doing Live at the Met,” Juan de Fuca Foundation for the Arts Executive Director Kyle LeMaire announced this week.
In collaboration with Ghostlight Productions, “La Traviata” will light the 25- by 15-foot movie screen this Saturday at the Naval Elks Lodge, 131 E. First St., in a simulcast directly from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Viewers will experience the Met’s “Live in HD,” as in high-definition, production in its entirety, with soprano Nadine Sierra as Violetta and tenor Stephen Costello as her lover Alfredo; soprano Renée Fleming will host the live transmission.
“La Traviata” is sung in Italian with English subtitles provided and Daniele Callegari of Milan, Italy, conducting the Met orchestra.
Show time is 9:55 a.m. Saturday in this first opera in the series presented by Ghostlight and JFFA. Tickets are $18 for seniors, $24 general and $14 for students, at JFFA.org and at the door.
The role of Violetta in “La Traviata” is considered the pinnacle of the soprano repertoire, according to the Met’s website, metopera.org.
In Act I, Violetta tries to tell Alfredo there’s no place for his romantic feelings — she’s not inclined to give up her way of life — but she presents him with a camellia flower anyway. Return to me when its bloom has faded, she tells him.
Our “fallen woman” is torn by mixed emotions. She senses that Alfredo has awakened her, longing to be deeply loved. What follows is one of the opera world’s most beloved sagas.
“We want to offer our audiences performances they wouldn’t otherwise get to see,” LeMaire said.
The Met’s Live in HD series is presented at the Rose Theatre in Port Townsend, but it hasn’t been available on a movie screen in Clallam County.
Ghostlight Productions, whose future home is the Lincoln Theater in downtown Port Angeles, initiated the contract with the Met, LeMaire added.
State-of-the-art projection and the big screen will make it a spectacle, he said.
“It felt like such a natural synergy,” LeMaire said.
“Both Ghostlight and JFFA want to offer these incredible events for our community,” he said.
The Live in HD series will bring nine operas to town: one per month until June.
The next is “The Hours,” simulcast from New York City on Dec. 10. The production, adapted from Michael Cunningham’s novel and inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” stars Kelli O’Hara, Joyce DiDonato and Renée Fleming as three women from three eras, each facing her inner demons and dealing with her place in society.
The simulcasts, which feature backstage tours and interviews — “each one is a little different,” LeMaire said — open the opera house doors to people on the opposite side of the country, for considerably less than the New York City prices. Tickets to the Metropolitan Opera on Manhattan’s Upper West Side range from $99 to $850.
“Seeing an opera of this caliber in Port Angeles is a communal experience unlike anything JFFA and Ghostlight have ever presented before,” LeMaire added.
Nadine Sierra sings the role of Violetta Valery in the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Traviata,” to be simulcast live this Saturday at the Naval Elks Lodge in Port Angeles. (Metropolitan Opera)
