With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) combines the worlds of film and opera at the Festival Verdi in Parma with an all new approach to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, staged and edited by himself and Saskia Boddeke. Turning the auditorium into part of the set, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese into his staging. With the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a striking imagery that includes depictions of the Madonna, modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children. “It is a thrilling moment when threads of light spread over the darkened arches during the overture, shaping the architecture and flooding the whole area with changing light patterns.” (Daily Express)
Tutto Verdi – The Operas Vol. 2, 1847 – 1853
Stiffelio
TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances. “This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI
The wife of a Protestant preacher as an adulteress – problems with the censor were inevitable from the outset with Verdi’s opera Stiffelio, which was premièred in November 1850. Even today the finale seems astonishingly bold: superficially it deals with forgiveness and reconciliation, but the orchestral writing is in such striking contrast that Verdi appears to be tolling the death knell of the protagonists’ marriage.
Giovanna d’Arco
With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato) combines the worlds of film and opera with Giovanna d’Arco at the Verdi Festival in Parma. The opera’s libretto is based on Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans. It tells the story of the French national hero Jeanne d’Arc. Earthly passion and supernatural purity are rendered vivid in the musical interpretation of the Virtuosi Italiani and the Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma, conducted by Ramón Tebar, and by three exceptional singers, Vittoria Yeo, Luciano Ganci and Vittorio Vitelli, “who have the Verdian idiom in their blood, performing veritable miracles of expressive singing and italianità” (Kieler Nachrichten). Turning the auditorium into the scene, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese, one of Italy’s oldest and most exceptional theatre gems, into his staging. By the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a picture language that reaches from depictions of the Madonna to modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children.