High culture keeps rolling into the North Country. First Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center, and then Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater and South Burlington’s Palace 9 Cinema got the Metropolitan Opera series in high-definition digital, thrilling aria fans with live broadcasts from the Met’s Saturday afternoon performances. Now Merrill’s Roxy Cinema in Burlington is going HD, bringing prerecorded performances of Aida, La Traviata, Rigoletto and I Puritani from Milan’s La Scala and other European stages to South Winooski Avenue this month and next.

The Roxy signed up with Emerging Pictures, a New York-based cinematic content provider that also carries independent and foreign films, concert films, documentaries, ballets and more in HD. Theater owner Merrill Jarvis III says he hopes to bring live-broadcast programs from La Scala in the future. “We’re waiting to see how these turn out,” he says, “because we have to get more technology — we need a satellite to pick up the signal.” He also plans to show performances by Russia’s Kirov Ballet, as well as rock concert films, including one from Bruce Springsteen. Stay tuned…

Ready for a night at the opera?

Aida, Verdi’s classic opera, kicks off the Roxy’s “Opera in Cinema” series with two screenings, on Sunday, July 26, at 11 a.m. and Thursday, July 30, at 6 p.m. Click here or check the Seven Days showtimes or events calendar for future showings.

This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2009.

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Pamela Polston is a contributing arts and culture writer and editor. She cofounded Seven Days in 1995 with Paula Routly and served as arts editor, associate publisher and writer. Her distinctive arts journalism earned numerous awards from the Vermont...