It‘s an event that draws many thousands of music lovers to Verona every summer: the opera season at the ancient Roman Arena. One of the highlights of the 2006 season was the riveting production of Puccini‘s “Tosca“ by Argentine director Hugo de Ana. Nearly 15,000 spectators regularly filled the amphitheater for the performances of the Puccini favorite with a stellar cast – Fiorenza Cedolins, Marcelo Álvarez and Ruggero Raimondi – under the baton of Daniel Oren. “An altogether perfect staging, with the director exploiting to the fullest the vast space of the amphitheater and designing grandiose scenes and magnificent costumes,“ wrote Italian daily Corriere della Sera
Rigoletto
Ages from its premiere at La Fenice in 1851, Italian opera director Daniele Abbado brings his new vision for Verdi’s tragic opera (and Piave’s gorgeously effective libretto) Rigoletto to Venice’s historic opera house. Opening night’s cast is Eric Cutler as The Duke, Roberto Frontali as Rigoletto, and Désirée Rancatore as Gilda. Myung-Whun Chung conducts.
Tosca
A superlative staging of Puccini’s Tosca by Italian opera producer Hugo de Ana brought to you from the world-famous Arena di Verona and complete with all the splendour that a Puccini opera demands! The popular tragedy is sung by a dream team cast of excellent singer-actors and conducted by long-established Arena di Verona conductor Daniel Oren.
The recording captures one of those special Verona summer evenings, when the audience fills the historic circle in expectation of the enjoyment of an open-air opera performance. Verona’s amphitheatre, known as the ‘arena’, provides an atmospheric setting for the summer festival. To view an opera in the former amphitheatre, the second largest of its kind after the Colosseum in Rome, can truly be regarded as an impressive experience. The TV transmission, however, provides a closer look at the stage and the singers and brings this dramatic opera directly to the home viewer.
Tutto Verdi – The Operas Vol. 2, 1847 – 1853
Rigoletto
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
For Verdi, Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse was “arguably the greatest drama of the present day“. But many of his contemporaries were scandalized by this tale of corpses, jesters, cripples and a king addicted to venal love. And yet this no doubt helps to explain why Rigoletto turned out to be Verdi’s second great success and laid the foundations for his emergence as Italy’s leading opera composer.
Belcanto D´Amore (Aida, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, Rigoletto, Turandot)
AIDA
Iano Tamar, Iain Paterson,
Tatiana Serjan, Rubens
Pellizzari
Vienna Symphonic Orchestra
Carlo Rizzi
Staged by Graham Vick
MADAMA BUTTERFLY
Raffaela Angeletti
Nino Batatunashvili
Annunziato Vestri
Fondatione Orchestra
Regionale Delle Marche
Daniele Callegari
Staged by Pier Luigi Pizzi
TURANDOT
Maria Guleghina, Marco Berti,
Javier Agulló
Orquestra de la Comunitat
Valenciana
Zubin Metha
Staged by Chen Kaige
LA TRAVIATA
Svetla Vassileva, Massimo
Giordano, Valdimir Stoyanov
Orchestra e Coro del Teatro
Regio di Parma
Yuri Temirkanov
Staged by Karl-Ernst & Ursel
Herrmann
RIGOLETTO
Francesco Demuro, Leo Nucci
Nino Machaidze, Marco Spotti
Orchestra e Coro del Teatro
Regio di Parma
Massimo Zanetti
Staged by Stefano Vizioli