DVD Videos

The label Disquiet Media has been developed to showcase the talent of the multi-award-winning contemporary Dutch composer, film maker, and director Michel van der Aa. The first two CDs (DQM01 and DQM02), released in 2010, featured some of his orchestral and chamber music. This new DVD is of “One - A Chamber Opera for Soprano and Video”, written for and given a phenomenal performance by Canadian Amsterdam-based soprano Barbara Hannigan.

Michel van der Aa’s wrote his chamber opera “One” in 2002 for the acclaimed soprano Barbara Hannigan, who takes the lead role in this recording. Accompanied only by video and an electronic soundtrack, she plays a solitary woman trapped in a cage of real and ‘captured’ time. Voices of other women are introduced and slowly she becomes entwined in a strange and mysterious ritual. It was premiered on 12 January 2003 by Barbara Hannigan in the Amsterdam Frascati Theatre. Since then the production has been in great demand abroad and has been performed to critical and audience acclaim in eleven countries, at festivals including the Berliner Festspiele, Paris Festival de L’automne, Oslo Ultima Festival, Warsaw Autumn, and the Venice Biennale.

Michel van der Aa was born in the Netherlands in 1970, and is one of Europe’s most highly regarded contemporary composers. Van der Aa's works often include a theatrical element, where staging, film, and music are seamlessly interwoven. His style is independent in spirit and characterised by the use of rhythm and chords as structural elements.

Region: 0 (All Regions)

Duration: 46mins

Picture Format: PAL, 16:9 anamorphic widescreen

Sound Format: Dolby Digital stereo and DTS surround audio

Subtitles: None

Part cello concerto, part film opera, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s Upclose explores the human condition through reflected and overlapping sounds, images and plotlines. On this DVD, recorded during a European tour in March 2011, it is performed by its dedicatees, the much admired young cellist Sol Gabetta and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, while Vakil Eelman plays the solitary elderly lady in the filmed segments.

A solo cellist begins with a melancholy, yet insistent soliloquy. As the string orchestra behind her joins in, an image suddenly appears on screen. In the middle of a deserted concert stage, laid out exactly as for the concerto, an old woman is seen scribbling coded messages on sheets of paper. Her actions and those of the cellist come closer and closer until at the end they mimic one another, without ever completely connecting. Images and music leak from screen to stage and back again in a poetic exploration of the rituals of communication.

Themes of virtual reality and plural identities have been present in Van der Aa’s music for ten years, but in the riveting Up-close he goes even further, folding sound and screen over and over on themselves until certainty slips completely from the audience’s grasp.

Gramophone’s Young Artist of the Year in 2010, the Argentine-French cellist Sol Gabetta impresses wherever she plays with her captivating interpretations, her passionate, fullbodied playing and her charismatic personality. A Sony recording artist, since 2006 she has directed the Solsberg Festival in Switzerland, her chosen home, and recently founded the Baroque orchestra, ‘Capella Gabetta’.

DVD specifications:

Region: 0 (All Regions)

Duration: 31 mins

Picture Format: PAL, 16:9 anamorphic widescreen

Sound Format: PCM stereo, Dolby and DTS surround audio

Subtitles: None

An operetta in 4 acts with music by Paul Abraham. Recorded live at the Budapest Operetta Theatre.

English Subtitles.

Choreography and TV adaptation by Mats Ek

Stage Designed by Marie-Louise De Geer Bergenstråhle

“Giselle“ is seen as the epitome of romantic ballet and ever since its debut performance in 1841, it features among the standard repertoire of countless ballet companies. The acclaimed Swedish choreographer and dancer, Mats Ek, made dance history in the early eighties with his bizarrely unromantic and radically drastic new interpretation of the ballet classic. He interpreted the content and the style of the second act in a contemporary way for the Swedish Cullberg Ballet - one of the most famous modern dance formations in the world. Mats Ek keeps the music of Adolphe Adam: he uses a 1969 recording of the Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonynge that we also hear in this studio recording. The premiere cast of characters, Ana Laguna (Giselle), Luc Bouy (Albrecht), Yvan Auzely (Hilarion), Vanessa McIntosh (Bathilde) and Lena Wennergren (Myrtha), turn the accompanying recording into a fi rst class ballet documentation.

“My version of Giselle is an attempt at retelling the story. For me Giselle – and this applies to the old ballet as well – is about love. Love, which in the old version conquers death. That differs in mine. But love remains the main thing.” Mats Ek

Sound Format: PCM Stereo

DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC

Picture Format: 4:3

Running Time: 89 mins

FSK: 0