DVD Videos

Since 2004 Venice‘s rebuilt Teatro La Fenice has welcomed each New Year with a celebration of opera and symphonic music. Since that date, the Venetian concert has become a regular and increasingly popular fixture with television audiences, taking over the lead from the Viennese New Year’s Concert with its all-waltzes programme. Venice instead of Vienna that means opera instead of waltzes – a variety of highlights from Rossini, Verdi, Bellini, Paganini and Mascagni too. The choice of performers is made each year from the ranks of great conductors and acclaimed soloists, people who can rouse an audience and touch its emotions in the space of a few moments. As for the repertoire, the pieces chosen – arias, choruses and opera overtures – are almost always short, familiar and well-loved, all of them among the most-requested operatic gems, presented with the intention of keeping the memory of musical theatre, its stories and characters, alive.

Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1

Picture Format: 4:3

DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC

Running Time: 95 mins

FSK: 0

MATTHEW BOURNE’S Olivier Award Winning Production

ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING

Choreography by Yuri Papko

Set Design Alena Pikalova

This DVD presents a lavish and naturalistic staging of Eugene Onegin performed in Moscow, the city where the work had its world premiere on 29 March 1879. In their production, the Bolshoi not only adopted a traditional music theatre approach, they also successfully revived a previous and popular production. A feast of music is spread before the audience for their pure enjoyment. The gifted singers are so secure in their command of the Russian idiom that the music’s inner content, its lyrismo, is constantly at the fore. Vladimir Redkin with his profound, glowing baritone takes the title-role, and Maria Gavrilova sings Tatyana, her soprano gleaming at the top, is almost unequalled for warmth and radiance. This Eugene Onegin is a sumptuously arrayed feast of singing. But it is also a feast of good theatre, because it concentrates on the most important element of the tale it tells; namely the tragedy of the human soul and its suffering. The setting and costumes are naturalistic and the drama develops its intensity primarily from the music and the text.

Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1

Picture Format: 4:3

DVD Format: 1 DVD9 & 1 DVD5, NTSC

Subtitle Languages: GB, DE, FR, IT, ES, CN

Running Time: 157 mins

FSK: 0

Obsessive in gambling and in love, the soldier Hermann is the protagonist of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame, based on a story by Pushkin. He is smitten with the aristocratic Lisa and fixated on learning the winning secret of ‘the three cards’ from her grandmother, the Countess, played by iconic contralto Ewa Podles. This opulent production from Barcelona’s Liceu captures St Petersburg in the era of Catherine the Great, while the house’s Music Director Michael Boden conducts a large and impressive cast.

Extra features:

Cast Gallery

Running time 183 mins

Region Code All regions

Picture format 16:9 Anamorphic

Sound format 2.0LPCM + 5.1(5.0) DTS

Menu languages EN

Subtitles EN/FR/DE/ES/CA

A rarity among Tchaikovsky’s operas, The Enchantress (also known as The Sorceress) is presented here in a live performance by the esteemed Nizhegorodsky State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet; Pavel Reznikov, conductor (Moscow, 1984). Sung in Russian; subtitles in English, French, and Russian, Color, 4:3, 156 min., All regions.

Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress was composed during a happily reclusive period in the composer’s life. Living in a country house in Maidanovo, he described himself as “contented, cheerful, and quiet.” In the spring of 1885, Tchaikovsky discovered Shpazhinsky’s play The Enchantress, which greatly attracted him as an operatic subject, affording him the chance to express dramatically a long-cherished phrase in Goethe’s Faust, “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” [the eternal-feminine draws us upwards]. Indeed, his characterization of the good-hearted and passionate inn-keeper Nastasya (affectionately called “Kuma” – literally, “godmother” – by her admirers, and branded an “enchantress” by her enemies) is one of his most fascinating operatic portraits. This 1984 production, performed by an excellent cast fully committed to the work, makes a strong case for The Enchantress as an unjustly neglected masterpiece.

Choreographer Peter Wright stages Swan Lake as a romantic Gothic tragedy.

This envigorating version focuses on the heartbreaking role of the Prince in the dramatic classic, honouring the 1895 Petipa/Ivanov original.

Valery Gergiev is widely recognised as the greatest modern interpreter of Tchaikovsky’s music and the Mariinsky holds a peerless reputation in the repertoire. Together they deliver definitive interpretations of Tchaikovsky’s most popular symphonies. These acclaimed performances were filmed at Salle Pleyel in Paris during January 2010, directed by Andy Sommer.

The themes of fate and death pervade Tchaikovsky’s final symphonies. The composition of the Fourth Symphony coincided with the breakdown of Tchaikovsky’s marriage and a failed suicide attempt, yet he considered it to be his greatest. In contrast he believed his Fifth to be flawed and uninviting, yet today this heartfelt work is widely regarded as one of his finest. The subject of fate is further instilled in the Sixth Symphony, premiered shortly before Tchaikovsky’s death. It was posthumously entitled ‘Pathétique’ by his brother and is a deeply melancholic work, full of dynamic extremes and an inherent sense of finality.

Additional bonus features interview with Valery Gergiev. Tommy Pearson - director.

Stereo 2.0 Dolby Digital

Surround 5.1 Dolby Digital

Choreography by PÄR ISBERG

Set Design by BO-RUBEN HEDWALL

Costume Design by ANN-MARI ANTTILA

Arthaus presents on DVD a production from the Royal Opera House in Stockholm: A Swedish “Nutcracker” – a version that interweaves the classical ballet wonderfully with Swedish traditions. The version seen here was the fifth production of the work in the history of the Royal Swedish Ballet, whose origins go back to the 18th century. It opened in December 1995 and is the work of the then forty-year-old Pär Isberg, who danced for the company as a soloist and is now in international demand as a choreographer. Isberg replaced Hoffmann’s characters with others from Swedish folklore drawn from Peter and Lotta’s Christmas, the immensely popular children’s book by Elsa Beskow (1874–1953). Not only does the choreography appear clearly inspired by Swedish folklore, but the designs by Bo-Ruben Hewall and Ann-Mari Anttila include motifs from Värmland.

But no matter which interpretation, there is always the music of Tchaikovsky – from the first success in a concert performance of the score in July 1892 to today it has remained one of the most popular and well known pieces of ballet music. The light and at the same time dramatic music can rightly claim to have added immensely to the ongoing success of this ballet.

Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1

Picture Format: 4:3

DVD Format: DVD 9, PAL

Running Time: 95 mins

FSK: 0

Choreography by THIERRY MALANDAIN

Sets and costumes by JORGE GALLARDO

Lighting design by JEAN-CLAUDE ASQUIÉ

Additional music by NICOLAS DUPÉROIR

“A few ballets, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, and Swan Lake, which at the end of the 19th Century brought together to the stage the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and two ballet masters of the imperial theatre, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, were conceived from three orchestral suites, which had become musical standards. Among these symphonic suites, The Nutcracker alone was written by the composer and performed under his direction before the creation of the completed ballet. It was on the occasion of a gala evening, so Tchaikovsky chose the „featured dances“, namely dances reserved for „entertainments“. Yet, even if he had considered using them, the orchestral suites of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake were included without his approval after his death. Destined to be performed in concerts, they were considered a sort of best off of each of the ballets; bringing together without an event-driven chronology, the „featured dances“ and a few numbers centred on the characters and the action. In looking for a title, I remembered that as a child I defined my wonderments as „Magifique“. Magnifique without a „n“ because hatred divides (the word for hatred in French sounds like the letter „n“), and that this invented word, a sort of short-circuited language, fits well with the intentions of this creation: to create magic or else recycle life’s raw material through expressive and poetic forms. However, the title is also „Tchaikovsky‘s Suites“, in order to be consistent i.e. “avoir de la suite dans ses idées”. Thierry Malandain

BONUS: Making of Magifique. Including interviews with Thierry Malandain and the dancers as well as rehearsal footage.

Sound Format: PCM Stereo

Picture Format: 16:9

DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC

Languages/Subtitles: FR, GB, DE (Bonus)

Running Time: 80 mins + 25 mins (Bonus)

FSK: 0