Elizabeth Calleo (Bastienne), Michael Slattery (Bastien), Martin Winkler (Colas) & Olivier Cesarini (Boy)
Orchestre de l’Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie, Laurence Equilbey (conductor & musical conception) & Claude Buchwald (director)
Anaïs & Olivier Spiro (film directors)
A wonderfully eerie and fantastical re-imagining of Mozart’s early oneact singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, presented here on DVD in a film adaptation by acclaimed directors, Anaïs and Olivier Spiro.
Elizabeth Calleo and Martin Winkler triumph in Mozart’s timeless magical tale - filmed live at the Opéra de Rouen in March 2007, whilst acclaimed conductor Laurence Equilbey directs the Orchestre de Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie. ‘Bastien under Bastienne’ is a one-act comic opera composed in 1768 by the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then twelve years old. It was one of Mozart’s first operatic works and one in which the musical and dramatic genius of Mozart is already apparent.
‘Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne’, a show devised by Laurence Equilbey and director Claude Buchvald, includes not only the opera proper but also other pieces by Mozart drawn from serenades, divertimenti, and dance. These musical inserts, composed around the same time of the opera, serve to illustrate fragments of the imagination, moments of fantasy, accompanying the magic of the forest and the emotions of the hero and heroine. “It is an initiatory tale which speaks to us of our fears, our dreams, our condition” – Claude Buchvald (director)
