Roméo et Juliette

This live recording features a concert performance of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, a dramatic symphony, with solo and choral voices, in the original French language version.

Sir Colin Davis conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Chorus and Orchestra with soloists Philip Langridge (tenor), Hanna Schwarz (alto) and Peter Meven (bass).

Roméo et Juliette is the greatest and most satisfying of all Shakespearean works and inspired Berlioz to one of his best and successful dramatic symphonies. Intended for the concert hall, ist musical core is purely orchestral, while the outer movements are choral and vocal, their function being narrative and more theatrical. Yet the whole piece coheres magically and no other work of Berlioz more perfectly demonstrates both his poetic and the individuality of his genius.

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.

Cosi fan tutte

From the Drottningholm Court Theatre 1987 Described as “the Östman pièce de resistance” (Financial Times), this production is performed by an extensively-rehearsed cast of young Swedish singers who “…proved a triumph of stylish teamwork, with singers and orchestra listening to each other, almost, as it were, breathing together” (Daily Mail). Östman collaborated with producer Willy Decker and designer Tobias Hoheisel to realise his vision of Mozart’s charming comic opera. (Sung in Italian)

Tietaejien Lahja (The Gift of the Magi)

Created specially for television and recorded in studio, this short opera by one of today’s most eminent Finnish composers is based on a Christmas story by the American writer O. Henry.

Rautavaara sets The Gift of the Magi in a poor district of Helsinki in the 19 Minna (Pia Freund) and Joel (Jaako Kortekangas), two young newly-weds, are having trouble paying their rent, let alone buying Christmas presents. Yet they both long to give the other something special as an expression of their love.

So that she can buy Joel a chain for his watch, his most treasured possession, Minna sells her beautiful hair. Joel adores his wife’s shining locks and parts with his watch so that he can purchase the magnificent set of jewelled combs she covets. Though their gifts are now useless, their joy in each other’s love is precious beyond value. In the words of O. Henry: “Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are the wisest, They are the magi.”

The telling of the story is unsentimental, Hannu Heikinheimo’s staging exquisitely observed, and Rautavaara’s music powerfully compelling. The Christmas message finds a truly imaginative and unequivocal expression in The Gift of the Magi.

Masterclass: Christa Ludwig

Christa Ludwig is acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most explorative and complete vocal artists. Her professional singing career spanned five decades. Two public masterclasses, recorded at the Volkstheater in Vienna, show her working with young singers set on finding success on the operatic stage. Candid, humorous and encouraging, she focuses on the dramatic truth expressed in the arias of their choice and helps them to communicate this in their interpretations.

Let’s Make an Opera!

This operatic entertainment for young people starts in the form of a play, with a group of children preparing an opera, a Victorian tale called The Little Sweep. Then comes the opera itself. Prix Italia-winning director Petr Weigl adds yet another ‘frame’ to Britten’s original in the form of his own zany preamble: a surreal, slapstick sequence introducing a cast of quirky characters who later form the audience for the children’s performance. He sets his film at the turn of the nineteenth century with elegant period costumes and settings.

Parsifal – Search for the Holy Grail

The Grail – the cup which Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper, and which subsequently collected His blood as He bled on the Cross – is one of the most powerful symbols in the last two thousand years of Western culture.

Parsifal, Wagner’ three-act opera, is the most famous work to celebrate the Search for the Grail. First performed in 1882, and written especially for the composer’s revolutionary theatre in Bayreuth, Parsifal has towered above twentieth-century culture, in so far as it became a principal source of inspiration for Hitler.

Tony Palmer’s film centres round a performance of Parsifal, with the unmistakable Placido Domingo in the title role, and conducted by the distinguished Valery Gergiev. The striking documentary, narrated by Domingo himself, offers a description of the plot and explores theories about Parsifal’s origins and considerable sphere of influence.

The music was recorded at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg and in the gardens of the Villa Rufolo in Ravello, Italy, which had been a principal source of inspiration for Wagner.

This powerful and controversial film provides an invaluable oppurtanity to explore Wagner and his most intense opera.

Sir André Previn – The Kindness of Strangers

Sir André Previn’s success is phenomenal: from Berlin refugee to multi-Oscar-winning film score composer, from renowned jazz pianist to chief conductor of both the London Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras. This film was made with him as his first opera, A Streetcar Named Desire, was being staged at the San Francisco Opera. It follows the production from first rehearsals through to opening night and Previn talks candidly about the experience, relating it to his international life and career.

Ariodante

Sung in English. When this production of Handel’s Ariodante – directed by David Alden and conducted by Ivor Bolton – had ist premiere, it met with unanimous critical and popular acclaim. Alden, as a theatrical modernist, transformed the opera seria into an eroticallycharged nightmare of lust, betrayal and violated innocence. With a superlative cast including Ann Murray, Joan Rodgers and Gwynne Howell this rich and strange Ariodante is a surprisingly modern drama of psychological and physical cruelty.

Ariodante is Handel’s 1735 setting of an episode from Ariosto, in which the King of Scotland’s daughter is treacherously accused of infidelity to her promised husband. The central situation of sexual jealousy and mistaken identity is set amidst a web of intense family

relationships. The range of feelings provoked as the characters develop is caught in music of quite extraordinary emotional power, even by Handel’s own exalted standards.

The Rake’s Progress

From the Salzburg Festival 1996: This striking Salzburg Festival production is the result of a collaboration between director Peter Mussbach and the leading German artist Jörg Immendorff, whose spectacular, self-referential and humorous designs were hailed as a triumph. Their fascinating and complex interpretation of the moral tale has Tom Rakewell as an artist in search of his aesthetic position. An exceptionally fine musical performance features Jerry Hadley as Tom, Dawn Upshaw as Anne, and Monte Pederson as Nick Shadow. Sylvain Cambreling conducts the Camerata Academica. (Sung in English)