My friend Ann was ready for the opera. Which meant she was prowling the corridors of Quality 16 looking for friends with whom to share her loot: neatly scissored coupons, extracted from her front jeans pocket, each good for a free 20 oz. soda with the purchase of a small popcorn. She had enough for me to indulge once during the second act of Puccini’s “Tosca” (PDF) and then again — inspired by Scarpia’s appetites for both evil and whole roast chicken — in the third.

Opera at the movies is a different beast from opera in the Big House. Just how much that’s true hit me when I followed that early October Metropolitan Opera “Tosca” in Ann Arbor — the first of this season’s Met’s “Live in HD” presentations — with a late-October “Der Rosenkavalier” at the house itself.

Both times, I got backstage. At the Met, where the house and its general manager, Peter Gelb, were on my itinerary as one of 24 journalists attending an NEA music journalism institute, I got the deluxe tour. I poked around set shops, talked with carpenters and drapers, glimpsed the mad contortions of singers rehearsing Janacek’s “House of the Dead” and traveled corridors lined with bits and pieces of productions: here a leaf-filled tube labeled “Boxwood Garlands for ‘Norma,’” there the giant schnoz for Shostakovich’s “The Nose.” I made my only likely appearance on the stage itself, watching stagehands turn the vast space into the peach and gilt Rococo drawing room for Act I of “Rosenkavalier.”

It was fabulous. But so was my encounter, a few weeks earlier at Quality 16, with perky mezzo Susan Graham, the Met’s “Live in HD” intermission host. Graham thrust a microphone at Karita Mattila, our Tosca, still breathing hard as she came offstage after stabbing Scarpia, and asked: “How does it feel?” Wow. TV news meets the opera. The question recalled the inanity of evening news shows, but the new context repressed my usual eye-rolling “How do you think it feels, dodo?” retort to the screen.

This sort of on-the-scene reportage, taken from the mass medium of television — but utterly suited to an art whose murder rate surpasses that of nation’s crime capitals — is calculated, of course, to reposition opera somewhere south of its snooty, high-art status. It’s a folksy touch, amplified by asking the singers if they want to say something to the folks back home — which they do, believe me, only in Finnish (Mattila) or Spanish (Marcelo Alvarez), or Aramaic (not yet, but who knows?). It’s all a far cry from the nose-in-the-air accents have ridden the airwaves on the intermission Metropolitan Opera Quiz.

It’s working, too: “Live in HD” is now self-supporting in its fourth season, Mia Bongiovanni, a producer of the series, told us in New York. (Note: locally, the series also takes place at Showcase Cinemas.) And maybe some of those who spring for the $22 movie-house ticket will also try the Met itself, restoring the house to the 90 percent capacity it enjoyed a decade or so ago. (It was down to about 70 percent around 2006, co-producer Elena Park told us, before it started climbing back up.)

At “Tosca,” in line for the restroom, I struck up a conversation with a woman who already attends the Met regularly. What made her unusual, though, was her taste for seeing the same production twice, once live and once in HD. The perspectives are startlingly different. In the HD “Tosca,” for example, tight close-ups were thrilling, but they rendered the furor over the production’s scenic aspects somewhat incomprehensible. Meanwhile, a broad shot of the great Te Deum scene, which is so potent live, was static and dull.

So what will happen later this season when we get to the great silvery panorama of the Presentation of the Rose in “Rosenkavalier,” a stunning visual complement to Strauss’s shivering, out-of-time music here? How will this year’s HD audience see it, and will it register?

There are bigger questions, too. Gelb said new productions are not conceived with the big screen in mind.

“It hasn’t affected productions at the Met,” he said, in answer to a question put to him by one of my journalist colleagues. “The challenges and time constraints are so great to put on a work in the theater that we don’t think about HD, and I’ve made it a rule for myself not to discuss it. Once we’re done, we think about what has to be done for HD.”

But it’s certain that the scales at the Met are tilting toward singers with strong acting skills (and lovely bodies and faces) and away from those whose avoir du poids is more weighted to the purely vocal. How that shift plays out on the screen — did I glimpse a more “made for television” style in Tosca? — may, of course, affect what we see on stage at the Met.

Addressing our little band of journalists, Gelb said he’s never worried HD would replace the live experience, just broaden the audience.

I think it’s doing more than that. If live opera is still, to some degree, about status, on the screen it’s become about community. During “Tosca’s” intermissions, patrons — young, old, middle-aged, people who knew each other and people who didn’t — gathered in the lobby to chat and compare notes. Along with the talking came the extraordinary sense of being connected to each other and to something much larger going on right now. That’s the new media effect. I’ve heard that audiences for the live broadcasts are much bigger than for the rebroadcasts, and I can see why.

The opera, and its cousin the orchestral concert, are changing with the times, reshaping and repackaging themselves in new mediums and delivering new messages. You can meet the Met (and your friends) at the movies or mosey to New York for an entirely different “live” experience; you can hear the Berliner Philharmoniker play Brahms’ third and fourth symphonies here at Hill Auditorium on Nov. 17, or hear the same program via webcast on Nov. 9 at 8 p.m. EST anywhere you have your laptop and internet access. That concert, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, is free, unlike most of the live-streamed concerts in the Berlin’s excellent Digital Concert Hall series. (To register for the free webcast, visit the DB web site and click on the green "register now" box near the top of the page.)

And remember, doors to the digital concert hall open at 7:45 p.m. You’ll have to make your own popcorn.

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.