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
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.
Mosè
For the first time the opera “Mosè” by Gioachino Rossini is on stage inside a Cathedral in a semi-scenic performance at the Duomo di Milano. The Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, in the wake of a centuries-old tradition of dialogue with the contemporary, chooses the most advanced technology to open up to the world and the public with an immediacy never achieved until now, including lights and colors effects that characterize the scenes of the show, with an evocative videomapping technique.
Il Turco in Italia
A romantic poet, a gypsy girl, a spirited young wife and an Ottoman pasha: throw them together under the blue skies of Naples and the result is an opera buffa that’s precisely as fizzy and as farcical as you’d imagine from Rossini at the absolute top of his game. Il Turco in Italia is exuberant (and distinctly spicy) fun in the sun and Cesare Lievi’s delightful, candy-coloured 2002 staging from the Zurich Opera House has a cast to die for: with Cecilia Bartoli, no less, as the capricious Fiorilla and the veteran Ruggiero Raimondi exuding charisma and warmth as the Turk Selim.
I Lombardi alla prima crociata
The production from the Teatro di San Carlo of Naples is dominated by the formidable voices of Ruggero Raimondi as Pagano, a Muslim who helps the Crusaders, and Dimitra Theodossiou as Giselda, the Christian maiden captured by the Sultan of Antioch, and who falls in love with his son Oronte. Raimondi, an internationally celebrated bass-baritone even before his immortal turn as Don Giovanni in Joseph Losey’s 1979 film, imbues his voice with a rich melancholy that humanizes his ambiguous role. The young Greek-German soprano Theodossiou has been hailed as one of the most exciting new Verdi and bel canto voices ever since her success in Verdi’s ‘Attila’ in Bologna and Parma in 1999.
Assassinio nella Cattedrale
Pizzetti, one of Italy’s leading lyrical composers of the first half of the 20th century, composed several operas, of which ‘Assassinio nella Cattedrale’ is one of his most famous. Pizzetti’s religiosity manifests itself in his choice of T.S. Eliot’s modern-day miracle play about St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who returns from a seven-year-exile only to be confronted by various torments, including Four Temptations; he succumbs to the fourth, the temptation of martyrdom … . Internationally acclaimed bass-baritone Ruggero Raimondi, at home on all of the world’s major stages and unforgotten as Don Giovanni in Joseph Losey’s celebrated 1979 film, brings the firmness and authority of his vocal artistry to this role.
Also available: Making of Pizzetti’s ‘Assassinio Nella Cattedrale’ (15’ – A00501028)
Mosè
For the first time the opera “Moses” by Gioachino Rossini is on stage inside a Cathedral in a semi-scenic performance at the Duomo di Milano. The Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, in the wake of a centuries-old tradition of dialogue with the contemporary, chooses the most advanced technology to open up to the world and the public with an immediacy never achieved until now, including lights and colors effects that characterize the scenes of the show, with an evocative videomapping technique. With the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano Orchestra and Choir conducted by Francesco Quattrocchi, with the special presence of Ruggero Raimondi in the part of Mosè.