DVD Videos

Set Design by Robert Posik

Gian Carlo Menotti was one of the most important 20th-century composers of opera working in the United States. For his opera The Consul he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This unique studio recording from the early years of television is performed by an extraordinary cast featuring Melitta Muszely, Eberhard Waechter, Res Fischer and Hilde Konetzni. The plot of the politically charged drama takes place in Europe of the 1950s. The Orchestra of the Wiener Volksoper is conducted by Franz Bauer-Theussl. An important document of operatic and film history, this restored recording is available on DVD for the first time.

BONUS: Interview with Gian Carlo Menotti

Sound Format: PCM Mono

Picture Format: 4:3

DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC

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

Running Time: 99 mins (Opera), 4 mins (Bonus)

FSK: 0

In June 2008, Giuseppe Verdi temporarily replaced Richard Strauss as the presiding genius at Dresden’s Semperoper as baritone Željko Lucic, soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Juan Diego Flórez came together for a new production of Rigoletto, directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff and conducted by Fabio Luisi, chief conductor of the Semperoper, Dresden, General Music Director-elect of the Zurich Opera, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.

Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna star in the 2009 Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini’s La Rondine (The Swallow). This new production, directed by Nicholas Joël, was the company’s first staging in 70 years.

This elegant romance is the least-known work of the mature Giacomo Puccini. The story concerns a kept woman who defies convention to chase a dream of romantic love with an earnest, if naïve, young man. This Met Opera production features the dynamic soprano Angela Gheorghiu and Frenchborn tenor Roberto Alagna performing the roles of Magda and Ruggero, it blooms into its rightful place in the glorious Puccini canon.

La Rondine (The Swallow) was commissioned by Vienna’s Carltheater in 1913. Due to the impending outbreak of World War I, premiered in 1917, at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo with Gilda Dalla Rizza and Tito Schipa. Set in a Parisian salon, it is the story of Magda, the glamorous mistress of wealthy banker Rambaldo. Her yearning for romantic love compels her into the arms of the ardent and adoring young Ruggero.

The New York Times hailed the Art-Deco set production as “as sophisticated, charming and poignant”. This DVD features the 10th January, 2009 performance of the opera, which was aired globally in HD as well as two bonus interview featurettes: the first with Gheorghiu and Alagna; the second with Lisette Oropesa and Marius Brenciu, who sing the roles Lisette and Prunier respectively.

“Ms. Gheorghiu, as Magda, sings with gleaming sound and wonderfully dusky colorings…The conductor, Marco Armiliato, in what may be his best work to date at the Met, draws a nuanced and supple performance from the orchestra. I thought I knew this score quite well, but have never been so struck by the intricacies of the music”. The New York Times

“Mr Alagna supplied plenty of vocal and physical glamour and equal amounts of intelligent phrasing and text-reading; his boyish Ruggero was entirely sympathetic and very moving”. Classics Today

“I have never heard Alagna sing better, and Gheorghiu is at her sumptuous best. There are comparably beautiful performances by the younger couple, Marius Brenciu and Lisette Oropesa” New York Daily News

Bonuses:

Interview with Angela Gheorghiu & Roberto Alagna (3’35)

Interview with Lisette Oropesa & Marius Brenciu (4’21)

David McVicar's spectacular 2004 production of Gounod’s Faust, featuring a divine cast of opera’s superstars: Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, Bryn Terfel, Simon Keenlyside and Sophie Koch.

McVicar is one of the most innovative and in-demand directors, and his lush, haunting realised vision of Faust received glorious praise. The production revels in a gothic, seamy Second French Empire setting, with the Act V ballet “haunting the imagination long after” (The Independent).

“This is opera at its grandest and best” The Wall Street Journal

National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner’s new staging of Verdi’s grandest – and arguably greatest – opera, Don Carlo, was the highlight of the 2007/2008 Royal Opera House season. This new production marked Rolando Villazón’s much anticipated, triumphant return to the house.

Don Carlo is Verdi’s musical retelling of Schiller’s poem Don Carlos. Set amidst the political, religious and sexual intrigue of the 16th century Spanish court, this epic work is the tragic story of the virtuous young prince, Don Carlo when he is pitted against the powers of a dominant, corrupt society.

The Italian version premiered at Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 10th January, 1884, following the French premiere (Don Carlos) in 1867, at the Paris Opera. It was first staged at The Royal Opera House in 1886. This new production is the first new version of the 5-Act complete opera to be staged at Covent Garden in 50 years. With sets and costumes by Bob Crowley, direction by Nicholas Hytner and an enviable cast, this production of Don Carlo is worthy of the greatness of Verdi’s original, masterful work.

“Supported by designer Bob Crowley's dazzling coups de thêatre, and by Antonio Pappano's band in scintillating form, he directs with such vivid forcefulness – and such psychological acuity – that Verdi's great rumination on theocracy, and on the battle between patriarchy and the brotherhood of man, emerges in its full beauty and menace…Ferruccio Furlanetto's King Philip, a commanding presence conveying as much by his stillness as by his gloriously resonant voice…This full five-act version is a long evening, but time flies thanks to transcendent performances by Poplavskaya and Villazón, and to the beauty emanating from the pit”. The Independent

Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian

This year’s Mörbisch Lake Festival has brought an operetta classic to the stage. It has an unusually tragic plot for this genre but became a hit, largely though Richard Tauber’s association with the work. Here the Romanian tenor Tiberius Simu sings the role of the Zarewitsch.

Ton: STEREO Dolby Digital

Region Code: 0

Bildformat: PAL

Bildseitenformat: 16:9

Booklet: Englisch, Spanisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Deutsch.

Spieldauer: 150 Minuten. Subtitles: English, French, Italian

Claus Guth - staging

Director Claus Guth’s production of Mozart’s Da Ponte trilogy for the Salzburg Festival reaches its sensational conclusion with his elegant, stylish production of Così fan tutte from the “Haus für Mozart”. Guth bolsters the unity of the cycle by making ingenious reference to his stagings of the first two works, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.

His widely acclaimed production of the trilogy consolidates Guth’s international reputation as one of the most sought-afterstage directors of our time. Among his other major successes are Der fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth and Luisa Miller at the Bavarian State Opera.

Guth assembles a superb ensemble of young singers who toy with love and trust under the cynical gaze of ringmaster Bo Skovhus’ Don Alfonso and his foxy, temperamental sidekick Despina, played by fiery young soprano Patricia Petibon. Baritone Florian Boesch and tenor Topi Lehtipuu ideally complement their frisky partners Miah Persson and Isabel Leonard.

Conductor Adam Fischer keeps the tempi brisk and the Wiener Philharmoniker on their toes in his layered reading of the score.

Picture format DVD: NTSC 16:9

Sounds formats DVD: PCM Stereo, DD 5.0, DTS 5.0

Region code: 0

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Subtitles: Italiano, English, Deutsch, Français, Español, 日本語

Running time: 191 mins

Audience: all

FSK: 0

Claus Guth - staging

Wild animals live in the woods. Robbers hide there. Mystery is at home there. And, when the woods are on the stage of Salzburg’s Haus für Mozart, a notorious ladies’ man and his unsavoury accomplice can also find shelter there. For here, in the dense forest planted by director Claus Guth, is the home of the rugged macho Don Giovanni, who, assisted by Leporello, lures the ladies with the heady scent of danger. In Guth’s almost cinematic Salzburg Festival production, every character in Mozart’s most realistic opera seems to carry a back-story of thwarted love and frustration. Everyone appears to be seeking either salvation or damnation in the woods – a compelling concept that removes the opera from its traditional pseudo-Seville squares and palaces.

And when Don Giovanni is played by Christopher Maltman, it’s no wonder that Donna Anna (Annette Dasch), Donna Elvira (Dorothea Röschmann) and even Zerlina (Ekaterina Siurina) are ready to throw themselves at his feet. With a physique as striking as his full-bodied baritone voice, Maltman embodies Don Giovanni as an almost reluctant seducer, a man fated to bring misery to women and, ultimately, to himself. Next to Maltman, it is Uruguayan bass-baritone Erwin Schrott who rivets the audience in this production: Schrott’s Leporello is an event in his own right, the event of the Salzburg Don Giovanni (Die Welt).

Under Bertrand de Billy, the Wiener Philharmoniker play with refreshing verve and spirit.

Picture format DVD: NTSC 16:9

Sounds formats DVD: PCM Stereo, DD 5.0, DTS 5.0

Region code: 0

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Subtitles: Italiano, English, Deutsch, Français, Español, 日本語

Running time: 177 mins

Audience: all

FSK: 6

Directed for stage by Willy Decker.

One of the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind happened nearly 3000 years ago: the transition from polytheism to monotheism through the prophet Moses. God revealed himself directly to Moses, instructing him in absolute truth. God’s call to Moses presented a new idea that exploded all previous religious concepts: ‘One God – unique, eternal, intangible, inconceivable’. Moses understands this concept, but is unable to express it, and therefore God appoints Moses’ brother Aaron as his spokesman. They are bound to fail: Aaron can only approach sharing the idea by compromising its meaning, whilst Moses is left to search fruitlessly for “the word I lack …”.

When Arnold Schoenberg composed what he regarded as the dramatisation of his religious beliefs, he felt as though he was himself a Moses of the art. “Endowed with a sense of mission”, Schönberg continually reflected on how “to make the unfathomable, fathomable”.

The operatic staging of this extraordinary idea by Hans Mayer involves scenic visions that make demands on stage machinery way beyond the boundaries of possibility. The impact of his grandiose composition is a deeply religious debate, uncompromising, radical and forthright.

Picture format DVD: NTSC 16:9

Sounds formats DVD: PCM Stereo, DD 5.0, DTS 5.0

Region code: 0

Booklet notes: English, German, French

Subtitles: English, Deutsch, Français

Running time:112 mins

Live Recording from The Deutsche Oper Berlin, 2010.

Set Design by Ulrike Siegrist & Philipp Stölz.

Richard Wagner’s early opera “Rienzi” is stylistically closer to Meyerbeer and bel canto than to Wagner’s later masterworks. Yet even this early work – especially as presented in this recording – is “so fantastically beautiful that it takes one’s breath away” (Berliner Zeitung). And in this staging by Philipp Stölzl, who condensed the five-act opera into a little over two hours, “Rienzi” becomes a startlingly powerful and timeless parable of power and abuse.

Though the story of the rise and fall of a charismatic leader and his totalitarian regime takes place in 14th-century Rome, Stölzl sets it somewhere in the recent past. The topic “anticipates the history of the 20th-century in a visionary way”, says Stölzl, adding that “one can make surprising analogies to many despots of this time: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu…” Since film was a central propaganda tool of 20th-century totalitarian systems, Stölzl uses film projections to make the “tribune” Rienzi tower above the masses or, in the style of old newsreels, to show a utopian “New Rome”. It is, after all, with films that Stölzl began his career: directing video clips for Rammstein and Madonna, then directing feature films (“North Face”, “Goethe!”) and staging operas at major venues, including the Salzburg Festival.

Tenor Torsten Kerl, who has visibly studied the gestures of the 20th century’s major dictators, gives a brilliant and eloquent Rienzi; his dutiful sister Irene, sung by Camilla Nylund with great lyrical intensity, is paired with a lover, Adriano, interpreted by the luminous mezzo Kate Aldrich, “the discovery of the evening” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). Also worthy of lead-role status is the chorus, which masters its demanding part with stunning presence and accuracy. The orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin is led with exuberance and precision by young conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing.

“…spectacularly thanks to brilliant pseudo-historic footage in the style of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films…The production is a knockout.” The Sunday Times

„Perhaps one of the strengths of this evening is that it helps one to be distrustful“ Die Zeit

BONUS: Making Of

Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.1, DTS 5.1

Picture Format: 16:9

DVD Format: 2 x DVD 9, NTSC

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

Running Time: 156 mins (Opera), 26 mins (Making Of)

FSK: 12