Tosca

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.

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