Verdi revelled in the power and fantasy of Shakespeare, and when he recreated Macbeth as an Italian opera he practically redefined the genre – demanding a Lady Macbeth who was a sublime actor as well as an outstanding singer. He’d have been thrilled with this production from Zurich Opera House, with its boldly imaginative staging by David Pountney and urgent, nuanced conducting from Franz Welser-Möst. But above all, he’d have been gripped by the young Sardinian soprano Paoletta Marrocu as Lady Macbeth, and an interpretation that Gramophone magazine compared to Maria Callas: “from first to last, a truly stunning performance”.
Don Giovanni
Mozart’s Don Giovanni is an opera that contains infinities: the adventures of the great seducer, his servant Leporello and the women he has wronged are as eternal (and as fascinating) as human nature itself. Jürgen Flimm’s classic production for Opernhaus Zürich leans into the shadows beneath the comic surface – and in this performance from 2001 Rodney Gilfry is a truly aristocratic Giovanni, with the sublime Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli at the pinnacle of her vocal and dramatic form as a mercurial Donna Elvira. Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts, bringing all his unrivalled feeling for 18th-century music to a score that never grows old.
Iphigenie en Tauride
The goddess Diana has spared Iphigenia from a cruel fate – but now, in a remote and savage land, the young princess faces an even more terrible choice. Gluck is 18th-century opera’s forgotten revolutionary, and with its uncompromising emotions and dramatic power his 1779 tragedy Iphigénie en Tauride inspired composers from Mozart to Berlioz. In 2001, for the Zurich Opera, director Claus Guth and 18th-century music specialist William Christie stripped it back to its timeless, mythic essentials. Juliette Galstian and Rodney Gilfry head a hand-picked cast in a period-inspired staging charged with ritual, grandeur and unchained passion.
The Lindsay String Quartet plays Haydn, Tippett & Elgar
For four decades until 2005, the Lindsay String Quartet (affectionately known as “The Lindsays”) was at the heart of chamber music life in Great Britain, touring globally and building a unique relationship with Sir Michael Tippett – who coached the ensemble in his music. Tippett’s powerful postwar Third Quartet is the centrepiece of this live recording from London’s flagship chamber music venue, the Wigmore Hall. In classic Lindsays style, it’s framed with a late Haydn quartet – “The Rider” – and another British classic: the troubled, poetic Quartet in E Minor by Sir Edward Elgar. At the time of this recording, the Lindsay String Quartet was probably its pre-eminent interpreter.
Helene Grimaud: Living With Wolves
Film maker Reiner Moritz presents and intimate portrait of the pianist Hélène Grimaud that not only looks back to her childhood and explores her career as one of the world’s leading pianists, touring around the globe – but also shows her in her role as conservationist and founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in New York. The result is a film examining Grimaud’s special artistry within the context of her broader personality and life; featuring extensive performance footage, it offers a fascinating glimpse into what makes one of the most sought after pianists of her generation who she is.
Helene Grimaud & Members of Orchestre de Paris play Schumann
Pianist Hélène Grimaud has been called “a renaissance woman”, and her painterly, passionate sensibility makes everything she plays glow with colour. She’s never more fully herself than when playing chamber music, and this beautifully filmed concert from 2001 captures that collaborative spirit in the round. Grimaud joins colleagues from the Orchestre de Paris at Paris’s Cité de la Musique to perform Schumann’s Piano Quintet and two gloriously poetic sets of miniatures. Together, they’re near-ideal interpreters of Schumann: a pianist-composer whose own imagination was never more potent than when (as here) the piano is merely first among equals in a world of high-Romantic emotion.
Helene Grimaud and Christoph Eschenbach at the Proms
There’s always a unique atmosphere at the BBC Proms: the summer music festival at which the world’s greatest artists perform before an audience of 5,000 in London’s colossal Royal Albert Hall. Some might say that it was Hélène Grimaud’s misfortune to make her debut there on the tragic date of 11 September 2001, but that only makes her achievement the more powerful – a fiercely intelligent, often dazzling performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. Eschenbach’s account of Symphonie Fantastique with this great French orchestra has the same life-affirming energy: delivered to a rapt crowd in an atmosphere of unmistakably heightened emotion