A half-hour interval filled with popcorn, cheese nachos and Coke — watching Così fan tutte in the cinema is not very Glyndebourne. But that’s the point. Opera is going to the movies and shedding its posh trappings. Mozart’s opera is the first of three Glyndebourne productions — Tristan und Isolde and Giulio Cesare are still to come — filmed during the summer and now screening in ten Odeon cinemas around the UK.

It’s an extraordinary experience. Shown in high definition (HD), the visuals are pin-sharp and vibrant. Thank goodness the stars of Così are photogenic; nobody wants to watch a Wagnerian heifer when the close-ups are this unforgiving. The sound, too, is rich and crisp.

For the price of a cinema ticket and a bucket of popcorn, audiences can now enjoy the world’s best opera on their doorsteps. New York’s Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting live relays of its new season to cinemas across America, Europe and Japan.

Here, the Royal Opera House is in rights negotiations with its orchestra and, as the new owners of Opus Arte (pioneers of opera DVDs and the producers of Glyndebourne’s cinema recordings), it hopes to announce a distribution deal including North America in the next month.

But will cinema audiences then make the leap to go to see live opera? And are they even getting a true operatic experience?

“It’s like the difference between going to a concert and listening to music on your iPod,” says 30-year-old Sarah Payne, watching Così on a night out at the Odeon Covent Garden in Central London. “You miss the power of the sound; you don’t get wrapped up in the music.” I certainly found that the visuals distracted me from the music. With a 5m-high face of Guglielmo on screen, I closed my eyes to hear Mozart’s tunes. And even the best Dolby sound in the world struggles to capture opera’s breathtaking vocal techniques.

For the Odeon audience — and everyone I spoke to had seen live opera — this was a different operatic experience, throwing new perspectives on familiar art. Nick McGee, 35, was one of several who booked for the screening after missing out on tickets to see Così at Glyndebourne. “Dramatically it works for me. I’m picking out stuff I don’t normally see — the relationships between the singers, for instance,” he says. “I feel a lot closer in visual terms but not musically.”

Ironically, given the imposing close-ups, a cinema audience is visually one step farther removed. In a live opera you do the editing — by choosing where to look on the stage. In screened opera, the decisions are made for you. Opus Arte filmed two performances of Così with seven cameras, mashing together the best bits. But Hans Petri, the founder and managing director of Opus Arte, thinks that opera audiences have much to thank HD for. From the costumes to the casting, he says, opera has to convince like never before. “You can’t get away with heavy make-up in HD,” he says.

Two things are driving opera in cinema: the arrival of digital HD and cinema’s search for “alternative content” — what you might call event cinema. You can watch tomorrow’s rugby World Cup final live at an Odeon, back-to-back with Lewis Hamilton in the Brazilian Grand Prix on Sunday. In time, we might see a musical beamed live from Broadway or the wild Mardi Gras parties from Sydney.

But while digital technology allows cinema to reach niche audiences, opera is pitching for a wider market. “Our aim is to increase accessibility,” says David Pickard, the general director of Glyndebourne. With tickets costing £7.50 (rather than the £180 or more that you could pay for a circle seat in the Sussex house) and screenings across the country, that’s a given. Less certain is whether cinema opera can tap into a new audience. Pickard is cautious: “I think we’re reaching new audiences for Glyndebourne. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say we’ve found a completely different audience for opera.”

In America about 200,000 people attended the Met Opera’s screenings last year. This season, the company will triple its US venues, while increasing UK screenings and looking to Asia. The US press has dubbed the Met “the Wal-Mart of opera”, the suggestion being that opera screened from the big houses will lure audiences away from live regional companies.

English Touring Opera performs in venues well within Glyndebourne’s cinema reach. “You might say that you can go to the cinema for £8 and see big opera stars, so why pay £20 to see a regional opera company?” says the ETO’s general director, James Conway. “But it’s not the same. I find nothing more boring than watching opera on screen. It might put people off live opera.”

The good news for Pickard is that the Così audience disagrees. Overwhelmingly engaged, they weren’t in the least apathetic. They laughed in the right places and felt the discomfort of the story. Many felt that this was a perfect introduction for anyone new to opera.

In any case, the future for opera may be in a different medium entirely. “The big thing around the corner is digital downloads and how far we exploit pieces on the internet,” says Pickard, imagining punters finding Glyndebourne clips on YouTube and then booking to see the real thing. “Maybe that’s the way we’ll get a first audience for opera, rather than people going to cinemas.”

Petri predicts that we’ll soon be downloading opera bites to our iPods and mobile phones. “It increases the seats in the auditorium with seats in the living room, in the cinema, in the train [listening to an iPod], on the bus . . .” he says. Opera: coming to a screen even closer to you.

From opera to film

The Magic Flute (1975)
Ingmar Bergman’s fantastical adaptation — far removed from his usual style — continues to enthral young audiences

Carmen (1984)
Julia Migenes smouldered as the femme fatale opposite Plácido Domingo’s Don José, directed by Francesco Rosi

Don Giovanni (1979)
Joseph Losey’s distinguished adaptation, with Ruggero Raimondi on superb form as opera’s greatest lothario

Glyndebourne’s Tristan und Isolde is in selected Odeon cinemas on Oct 25, 6pm; Giulio Cesare is on Nov 29, 6pm. For tickets, call 08712 244007 or visit www.odeon.co.uk

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