DVD Videos

“The outdoor romp of Philippe Calvario's Aix Festival production is dominated by the outlandish costumes of Aurore Popineau, including a festish-queen Fata Morgana who is flanked by bondage-boy devils… …Ygan Sokhiev enjoys a much closer relationship with his singers than he ever did during his ill-fated times at Welsh National Opera; he's both deft and definite with the many fluctuations of tempo and character.” BBC Music Magazine, December 2007 ****

“…the comic element is no less strong than in the two rival versions, partly because the sets and costumes are fun and the stage movement quite good… and partly because Tugan Sokhiev paces and colours the score at least as idiomatically as Nagano and far better than Denève, while his orchestra is by some distance the best of the three. There may not be any star names in the mainly Russian cast, but they all have strong voices and look confident on stage.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2007

“The score is crisply punctuated, still recognisably Prokoviev, but he rounds off the rough edges, stressing Ravellian colour and the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov. The balance between pit and stage was faultless, allowing singers to present often thankless vocal lines with ease.” Financial Times

“This will not be to everyone's taste… but it is an original, brilliantly executed and fascinating piece of work. …the live creation of video tableaux. The fully costumed cast move around on a bare downstage area, while fixed video camera's superimpose their every move onto magnified images of the model sets projected stage-wide above their heads. The conductor Jean-Christophe Spinonsi shows that even this early (1812) piece has virtuosity and pathos in equal measure. Though his frenetic style sometimes seems to the stop the music flowing, he draws an exciting performance from both his period band and an evenly matched cast.” BBC Music Magazine, February 2008 ****

“This is an utterly remarkable and fantastically enjoyable theatre-cum-video staging of Rossini's La pietra del paragone.
Philippe Béziat, who has described the production as 'the most original I have seen for a long time on the operatic stage', created his own filmic realisation during live performances in Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet. His breathtakingly precise and witty filming adds a further dimension to the experience.
So how, precisely, does it work? Watched by three video cameras that stand centre-stage, the performers play out the action in a blue virtual reality space devoid of scenery. On the edge of the stage are a series of miniature sets, equipped with their own bespoke cameras. Behind and above the singers is a bank of six video screens onto which the images of the players and the set designs are mixed and superimposed. To take just one example (there are hundreds as the performance unfolds), a tennis ball placed by the lovelorn Giocondo on the miniaturised set appears on screen as large yellow garden seat on which he appears to perch to sing his aria.
This aspect of the production – Rossini meets Magritte – is the work of the celebrated video artist and specialist in comic burlesque, Pierrick Sorin. As in a Magritte painting, the interplay of image and reality blurs our perceptions sufficiently to make us wonder whether what we thought to be reality is merely a construction of the mind. This is itself pure Rossini. At some point in a Rossini commedia the characters will question their grasp of reality. In more abstract pieces such as Il turco in Italia or La pietra itself (its plot the equivalent of a feature-length version of Friends rewritten by a specialist in black comedy) the sense of the drama being played out in a world that is not entirely real is all the more marked.
Stage director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti directs a gem of production. The video set designs, which have a chic minimalist 1920s feel to them, are the work of Sorin and Corsetti in collaboration with Cristian Taraborrelli whose vivid modern-dress costuming works brilliantly both on the all-blue virtual reality set and in the vibrantly coloured video show above.
The singers, a richly talented ensemble of rising young stars, are superb, not only in their delivery of Rossini's text but in their mastery of the hugely difficult task of playing simultaneously to camera and to the audience. Film closeups can be cruel to singers but they turn this to their advantage, building facial movements into a larger ensemble of gesture and mime. Jean- Christophe Spinosi's conducting of his period band Ensemble Matheus is a tour de force, funny in its own right. This is Rossini conducting of real point, colour, vibrancy and drive.
The DVD comes in a stylishly produced 100- page hardback rich in background information, including two superb essays by Rossini scholar Damien Colas. The show runs for two hours 40 minutes but since its ingenuity appears to know no bounds there are no longueurs. In the annals of Rossini performance, this is an important and entertaining landmark creation.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“[On Riccardo Muti] One of the towering musicians of our time” New York Times

“[Giordano] is fully equal to the vocal bravura demanded of her...But the opera is dominated by Desderi's dignified portrayal of Pasquale, and it is given greater pathos than usual...Muti keeps the action alive through every moment of Donizetti's miraculous score” Penguin Guide, 2011 edition

“Peter's line "Where the walls themselves gossip of inquest" - his cry of pain to Ellen after the coroner's open verdict on the loss of his first apprentice - cues the scenery and concept. The Borough, some of is citizens mounted on chairs and pillars permanenly suspended above an unchanging set, is never absent from this stylised, Brechtian (and Weillian) production. Pountney's stage has no room for naturalistic clutter - no real boats, no fishing nets, no beach. Ellen is allowed more intimacy with Peter than one often sees... but, as soon as she realises his obsessive work methods will never change, her "Peter - we've failed" is final, provoking Grimes to inevitable self-destruction. In a penultimate Mad Scene of haunting, almost religious (or sacrilegious) beauty, she and Balstrode sit with a dead boy each draped across their laps, either side of the constantly see-sawing Peter on a stylised boat platform with a cross-like mast. Unforgettable. Soon-to-depart Zürich maestro Welser-Möst's reading of the score is hardly less innovative, reminding one with its forward, motoric winds of some great, lost Shostakovich score and, ...this new EMI issue is carried by its cast, phenomenal chorus contribution, director and conductor to an important new interpretative level.” Gramophone Magazine, March 2008

“…Christopher Ventris is outstanding in the title role, and Emily Magee is a sturdy and strong Ellen Orford.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2008 **

“Peter's line 'Where the walls themselves gossip of inquest' – his cry of pain to Ellen after the coroner's open verdict on the loss of his first apprentice – cues the scenery and concept. The Borough, some of its citizens mounted on chairs and pillars permanently suspended above an unchanging set, is never absent from this stylised, Brechtian (and Weillian) production. Pountney's stage has no room for naturalistic clutter – no real boats, no fishing nets, no beach.
The English director's characters step out of years of 'English' ambiguity into a light of glaring every-man (and woman)-for-himself selfishness.
Balstrode listens to Grimes (Christopher Ventris, riveting) but only once (the capstan ensemble) does anything to help him; in the pub he gropes the women as much as Boles. Auntie, a red-headed Widow Begbick played with Oscar-winning charisma by Liliana Nikiteanu, and her Nieces are, quite openly, a Madame and her whores. Hobson, another terrifyingly intense portrayal, is a lazy, uncooperative psychopath, roused only by drink and the prospect of violence. Ellen is allowed more intimacy with Peter than one often sees but, as soon as she realises his obsessive work methods will never change, her 'Peter – we've failed' is final, provoking Grimes to inevitable self-destruction. In a penultimate Mad Scene of haunting, almost religious (or sacrilegious) beauty, she and Balstrode sit with a dead boy each draped across their laps, either side of the constantly see-sawing Peter on a stylised boat platform with a cross-like mast. Unforgettable.
Welser-Möst's reading of the score is hardly less innovative, reminding one with its forward, motoric winds of some great, lost Shostakovich score and, in the dance music so present in the pub scenes, of contemporaries Weill and Gershwin.
No Grimes on film is without some distinctive merit but this new EMI issue is carried by its cast, phenomenal chorus contribution, director and conductor to an important new interpretative level.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010