DVD Videos

“Gergiev conducts a sweeping performance, with a typically superb cast of the Kirov's revival years, full of rising stars - Diadkova, Ognovenko, Bezzubenkov and the superb character tenor Gassiev. Charming also is the staging, reproduced from airy, painterly 1920s sets. Museum opera, maybe; but then museums are there to preserve treasures. And this is an absolute gem.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2006 *****

Winner International Emmy - Best Arts Documentary, Winner Best Performing Arts Program, Gemini Awards & Winner Golden Prague Award

“The over-whelming virtue of Larry Weinstein's 1997 film is that it caught on camera… reliable witnesses - among them friends Isaak Glikman and Flora Litvinova, the late conductor Ilya Musin, and Venyamin Basner, who died shortly after retelling here the extraordinary story of Shostakovich's arrest in 1937... slices of the symphonies, very well played by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under Gergiev, serve only as soundtracks to well-edited image and narration.” BBC Music Magazine, February 2006 ****

“…brilliantly put together: expertly cut between speech and music, and accurately subtitled… Most valuable are the interviews with Shostakovich's surviving confidants, many of them deceased since the film was made in the mid-1990s. The musical extracts themselves are on the whole less well played than Gergiev's CD recordings yet in several instances, curiously superior as interpretations.” Gramophone Magazine, March 2006

“Oedipus Rex was conceived as an opera without drama or movement, in which the narrator gives the game away before the events are depicted on stage. Undaunted, Julie Taymor flings everything at it: archetypes from Japanese cinema, aboriginal performance traditions, ballet, puppetry and mask theatre. This celebrated 1992 production ought to look cluttered yet it works... While it's possible to imagine more driven conducting, the ensemble is well drilled and the cast unbeatable.” Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2005

“The production is in the best spirit of the Maryinsky, sumptuous to look at and full of period atmosphere...a faithful attempt to match what the composer might have expected to see on stage...This is a very distinguished production and a hugely enjoyable evening.” Penguin Guide, 2010 edition ****