Three previous volumes of this series were dedicated to La Scala. In this fourth DVD volume, we turn our attention to another beloved and well-known Italian operatic venue: the Arena of Verona, which is able to host more than 20,000 spectators and endowed with acoustics that are quite extraordinary.
This documentary, originally filmed in 16 mm, famed Italian journalist Enzo Biagi interviews the celebrity artists and directors who appeared at the Arena at the beginning of the 1908s, including Sherrill Millnes, Rajna Kabaiwanska, Fiorenza Cossotto, Mirella Freni, Rolando Panerai, Oliviero De Fabritiis, Nicola Martinucci , director Giancarlo Sbragia and set designer Giulio Coletllacci .
The DVD features excerpts from performances of Rigoletto, Aida, La traviata and Nabucco during that period of time.
Beatrice di Tenda is, to date, one of Vincenzo Bellini's more unfamiliar and rarely performed operas, even though it contains moments of extraordinary music. Based on a libretto by Felice Romani, Bellini's favourite collaborator, it was written in 1833 for Venice's La Fenice theatre. It was rather unsuccessful, but the musician always claimed it was on a par with his other, more popular works. Like all of Bellini's operas, Beatrice di Tenda calls for an outstanding female protagonist, for a role that today Dimitra Theodossiou is among the few who can tackle in all of its infinite variety of dramatic and vocal registers, reviving the glories of the great 19th-century bel canto sopranos.
Norma is the eight opera in Bellini's catalgue, and third last in chronological order, followed only by Beatrice di Tenda of 1833, and I Puritani of 1835. The text for the opera was the work of the best-known librettist, Felice Romani, and was based on a contemporary French drama, Norma au L'infanticide by Soumet.
Norma occupies a very particular place in operatic repertoire, a dramatic work of lyrical beauty, not least in the most fanous of Norma's arias, Casta diva (Chaste goddess), her first-act prayer to the moon. Oroveso calls the Druids to watch for the new moon in Ite sul colle, o Druidi (Go to the hills, O Druids) and in the second act he warns of Pollione's possible successor, inveighing against Roman tyranny in Ah! del Tebro al giogo indegno (Ah! To the disgraceful yoke of Rome). Norma has notable duets with Adalgisa and with Pollione, revealing different aspects of her tragic character.
Bellini, unlike many of his colleagues - among them Donizetti - did not have to endure the disappointments and difficulties of rising from the ranks. His Bianca e Gernando , in 1826, was well received at Naples's Teatro San Carlo, and one year later, at the age of twenty-six, the composer triumphed at Milan's La Scala with Il Pirata . Norma is not only the high point of Bellini's artistic parabola but also the quintessence of Italian belcanto.
This video was recorded at the Massimo Bellini theatre of Catania, native town of the great Sicilian composer, and features, in the title role, the famous Greek soprano Dimitra Theodossiou, one of today?EUR(TM)s best interpreters of Norma.
Against the beautiful backdrop of De Ana's woodland sets - vaguely reminiscent of Turning paintings - and video projections that create an aura of mystery, Eglise Gutierrez, Antonino Siragusa and Simone Alaimo recreate Bellini's bel canto masterpiece, in a production that is a tribute to the historical Visconti Sonnambula of 1955.
In the splendid setting of the Macerata Sferisterio, the tale of seduction and jealousy par excellence, with a commanding Nino Surguladze in the title role and the direction of twice Oscar-winner Dante Ferretti (The Aviator - Sweeney Todd), here at his debut in the world of opera.
Taken from Goethe's Faust, Mefistofele features the eternal human struggle between Good and Evil. The Story of Faust's temptation, dissolute life and redemption is set by director Giancarlo Del Monaco in contemporary society. Ferruccio Furlanetto delivers a charming, charismatic and strong interpretation of the devil, to remind us that evil is often very attractive.
Known mainly as the Paganini of the double bass , Giovanni Bottesini was in fact one of the most eclectic figures of Italian music in the second half of the nineteenth century. His Ero e Leandro met with great success whet it premiered in 1879, a success witnessed by the 28 performances that followed, an absolutely unthinkable number today.
After the composer's death it disappeared from the repertoire, only to be revived with the present staging. The score, stylistically comparable to the late Verdi, reveals unusual attention to orchestration and uses richly chromatic language. It may be set alongside operas like Ponchielli's La Gioconda and Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele , often showing a high quality of melodic inspiration.
On 10 October 2004, the Teatro Regio celebrated the birthday of Giuseppe Verdi by holding a concert featuring some of the most important artists and singers of the international music scene. The performance was part of an intended annual series in which extracts from each of Verdi's operas would be performed in chronological order to offer an analytic and comprehensive panorama of his output, and the concerts would bring to the stage the most acclaimed stars of the operatic world. The great baritone Leo Nucci and the famous tenor Jose Cura are featured in this video, and Renato Palumbo, musical director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducts.
Giasone - Jason - is not the hero one would expect, in this opera by Cavalli . Indeed, his easy morality makes of him, unexpectedly, quite the modern character. Says Mariame Clement, who directed the production.
"People think they know the story, because they think, Medea, Giasone [...] but actually there's much more going on than what we know in mythology. [...] What we tried to do is to recreate a mythology of our own, to have a sort of world that is neither modern nor ancient, that's not contemporary but not historical either... a world of its own."
A brilliant opera, which comedy, tragedy and fantasy are seamlessly interwoven. On the podium, the baroque specialist Federico Maria Sardelli; in the title role, the sensational counter-tenor Christophe Dumaux.
La virtu de' Strali d'Amore was the first ten operas Cavalli wrote with librettist Giovanni Faustini. Set in Cyprus, the plot involves enchanted and pastoral elements, love and its thwarting, the counterpointing of Man and God, sorcery, revelation and ultimate resolution, all accomplished in a brilliant series of scenes.
A follower of Monteverdi, Cavalli reveals the influence of the older man but also his own pronounced independence. Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante have become one of the most admired partnerships in the history of baroque music performance
Il Matrimonio segreto was first staged in Vienna on 7th February 1792 and was also one of the greatest successes in the history of the eighteenth-century opera. It is universally recognized as Cimarosa's masterpiece and the only one of his operas to have survived in the regular repertoire to this day.
Jackie O develops around the life of Jacqueline Kennedy; her image, following her husband's assassination, of "tragic princess", and the following events, which captured the attention of the world's media.
American composer Michael Daugherty has written a very modern work, in-between opera and jazz, inspired by American musical and the popular culture of the late 1960s .
Jackie's arias Egyptian Time, Jackie"s Credo and All his bright light possess a lyrical, melancholic and exotic allure; the ones sung by Onassis - the conceited, coarse, self-made man - have, instead,echoes of Las Vegas: his I am curious and Stiff drink bring us back to Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr. Maria Callas, who in the '60s was beginning to lose her voice, retraces her life with the songs Addio delPassato and Flame Duet. Liz Taylor is engaged in a blues-like riff that recalls a Cat on the hot tin roof atmosphere; whereas Princess Grace Kelly trills in Doris Day fashion. Andy Warhol's aria conforms to his art: a series of modulated repetitions. In the finale dramatic climax, in Jackie's Song, Jackie duets with her dead husband's voice. Damiano Michieletto's perfect direction is lively and full of colours, and the resemblance of the singers to real characters is impressive. A great tribute to the...
Gaetano Donizetti's L'Ange de Nisida was commissioned by the director of the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris. The libretto was entrusted to Gustave Vaez and Alphonse Royer, and the opera en quatre parties was completed in 1840. Unfortunately the theatre went bankrupt and the opera never reached the stage. Donizetti was aware that other venues would have rejected his work as it stood, for both repertoire and censorship reasons (the plot revolved around the King of Naples, Ferdinando d'Aragona, and his mistress). Consequently, he revised the score and incorporated a significant portion of it within his new one, La favorite .
The autograph score of L'Ange was subsequently lost and it is only thanks to the painstaking research of musicologist Candida Mantica that it was brought to light again. She took on the huge challenge of classifying the roughly 470 randomly alternate pages of L'Ange de Nisida that had survived at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris; she re-established their original order and finally managed to reconstruct roughly 97 percent of Donizetti's music. The few gaps in the score were judged as irrelevant by both Mantica and Donizetti Opera, so that the opera was considered a complete work in itself, with no need for additions...
Anna Bolena tells of a human drama of solitude and oppression; it is a work of psychological introspection centered, both from a dramaturgical and vocal point of view, around the protagonist, who soars to peaks of music splendour. A far-reaching opera, in which events and the tension developments between characters are thoroughly investigated. It is a very significant work in the history, as well as in Donizetti's own personal history, even though nowadays - and rightly so - it is no longer regarded, as it once was, as a sort of impromptu miracle.
Don Gregorio is the Neapolitan adaptation that Donizetti worked on his own L'ajo nell'imbarazzo , an opera first staged at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 4th February 1824. The subject was based on the play of the same name by Giovanni Giraud and the libretto of the original version was drawn up by Jacopo Ferretti, one of the Italy's leading librettists in the early nineteenth century. When Donizetti set to work on his Neapolitan version two years later, he was assisted by Andrea Leone Tottola whom he already worked with some of his operas.
Although some of the traditional passages were replaced by prose dialogue, a new numbers were added and others eliminated, Don Gregorio was still successful when it premiered on 11th June 1826 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples.
Staged in Milan in 1832, L'Elisir d'amore was written in a remarkably short time by librettist Felice Romani who based the text on a French libretto that Eugene Scribe had written for Daniel Auber and staged in Paris a year earlier. Romani's wife claimed that the whole work was written within a fortnight, an obvious exaggeration, since it seems that Donizetti had already completed much of the opera some three weeks before it was to be staged, not to open the season, but to be staged as a later part of it.
Who wouldn't want a love potion? Even today, quite a few people would readily trust Dulcamara and his promises of eternal happiness. The successful blend of comic and lyrical elements, of fun and feeling, are what make of L'Elisir d'amore such an enjoyable opera. A sparkling Alex Esposito leads the rest of the cast in this entertaining production of one of Donizetti's most beloved operas.
Among all Donizetti's operas, Lucia di Lammermoor has always been the favourite for both audiences and singers: and with good reason. First staged on the evening of 26th September 1835, the work was based on Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor which was published in June 1819. This novel received a mixed reception from the critics. Blackwood's, a popular journal at the time, declared it to be 'a pure and magnificent tragic romance', whilst other magazines regarded it as far too gloomy. Based on real-life events of 1669, this tale of love, feuds, deception and madness appealed very greatly to Scott's more general readership, as well as to some of the librettists and composers of his time; within fifteen years of the novel's publication at least five operas had been composed, based on the story of Lucia and her unhappy fate. It is no surprise, then, that Salvadore Cammarano relished the prospect of writing the libretto for such an opera himself and that Donizetti took to the idea equally enthusiastically.
Based on Victor Hugo's most sensational play, Lucrece Borgia , a scandalous tale of murder, torture, incest, homosexuality, drunkenness and orgies, Donizetti's opera is one of the great masterpieces of Italian bel canto repertoire. While omitting some of its more excessive elements, the libretto by Felice Romani inspired by Donizetti to compose superb arias, duets, ensemble and choruses, bringing each act to a stirring conclusion.
Beautifully costumed and designed, brimming with high drama and pathos, this production stars in the infamous title role Greek diva Dimitra Theodossiou, praised for her stupendous acting and singing in Donizetti's Robert Devereux .
With the release of this Maria Stuarda, recorded live in 2001, Dynamic makes an historic move, becoming the first Italian label to produce a DVD opera.
This very high quality production by Teatro Donizetti di Bergamo features, in the roles of the two queens, Carmela Remigio (Maria Stuarda) and Sonia Ganassi (Elisabetta), two great artists here making a fine display of their excellent vocal and acting skills. Francesco Esposito's direction and costumes and Italo Grassi's sets are very effective and superbly highlighted by the filming.
What makes this release even more interesting is the use of a new critical edition made by the renowned Swedish musicologist Anders Wiklund for Casa Ricordi.
Bonus features:
- Interviews with Carmela Remigio, Sonia Ganassi, Fabrizio Maria Carminati, Francesco Esposito, and Italo Grassi.
This early, long-forgotten opera by Donizetti was staged during the 2020 edition of the Festival dedicated to the composer, with full-Covid 19 safety measures on. Fondazione Donizetti and its scholars took on the challenge to stage a work which had no original printed copy of the libretto, no autograph score and a second act quintet - 'Aura gentil, che mormori' - which was completely missing. This latter was commissioned to Elio and Rocco Tanica with the collaboration of Enrico Melozzi, who created a new version which 'seamlessly blended with the rest of the score.' (Bachtrack). The mise-en-scene is contemporary, imaginative and playful.
This sparkling opera buffa is a premiere from the 2016 Donizetti Festival of Bergamo, with the part of Pasquale in Neapolitan dialect. It is the story of two rich merchant brothers from Lisbon, who are used to weighing everything against their bargaining power. Also the marriage of Pasquale's niece Isabella is a bargain to them: she must marry another merchant, so as not to break the family's tradition. The gags among the various are hilarious - especially those between the two brothers, who have completely different characters - creating an almost surreal atmosphere. The show is very colourful, thanks to the rich sets and costumes.
The thorny subject of marital violence is set against a hilarious backdrop in this one-act farce where, contrary to what we are used to seeing in opera, tenor and baritone do their best to free themselves of the female protagonist, to whom both are married. No doubt, Gaspar's aria on the joys of chastising one's wife in the way she deserves causes a few raised eyebrows nowadays, but the funny side is genuine and the music is brilliant, making of this forgotten little opera a true gem.
Roberto Devereux composed on 1837 saw the light of day during a period of intense creativity for Gaetano Donizetti . After its premiere and up until 1848, Devereux was performed almost uninterruptedly. In the years that followed it would also enjoy a successful international career, throughout Europe and in the Americas, with versions in French, German, Russian and Hungarian. When Donizetti moved to Paris in 1838, he enriched the opera with the overture that paraphrases the British anthem God Save the Queen. The Queen dominates from her very entrance, a true protagonist, here performed by the great Mariella Devia: her pure voice, perfect intonation, great stage presence, all combined with the technical qualities of her voice, led to an extended standing ovation. It was a great success, too, for Sonia Ganassi (Sarah) and tenor Stefan Pop (Devereux).
Revived after 171 years in oblivion, the staging of Rosmonda d'inghilterra at Bergamo's Teatro Donizetti proved fascinating for the Italian public.
The opera revolves around a tale of love and intrigue surrounding the main protagonists, the famous Queen of Eleanor of Aquitaine, her husband Henry II of England, and the fair Rosamund de Clifford. Rosmonda is the quintessential innocent, unaware that the man she loves is the King of England and that she has unwittingly become a rival to the much feared Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor, having already had her first marriage annulled for reasons of consanguinity, is unwilling to see her second marriage fail. Only the faithful page Arturo, secretly in love with Rosmonda, knows that the Queen is aware of her husband's betrayal, but he too is embroiled in this game of deceit, hoping that he will end up winning the girl.
The emotional and dramatic development is very effective. There is not a page in this score without some example of brilliant writing, a captivating theme, a moving passage. It all goes to prove how deeply original Donizetti was, and how much there is still to be discovered about this under-appreciated composer
In Donizetti's opera Maria Stuarda the roles of the doomed queen and her cousin, Elizabeth I, have been taken by some of the greatest divas, from Malibran to Gruberova and Tosi to Baltsa, each revelling in the high drama of their tragically linked fates.
"Contributing greatly to the success of the work, the young Maestro Riccardo Frizza revealed himself as a deep and sensitive interpreter of this score, managing to capture all the nuances of Donizetti's music. Laura Polverelli portrayed with elegance and pride the character of Elizabeth, her furies, doubts and jealousies; Maria Pia Piscitelli was a wonderful Maria Stuarda, passionate, sorrowful, proud, dignified when sentenced to death, recalling her past sins yet conscious of her innocence" (MusicCultura)
Baldassarre Galuppi's Mass for the Delivery of Slaves was written in 1765 for the choir of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, where the composer had recently been appointed music director. Written for soprano and alto solos, choir and orchestra, the Mass displays Galuppi's extraordinary (and previously largely unrecognized) contrapuntal mastery. Arguably, Galuppi's full talent as a composer is revealed more in his sacred works than those for the theatre. This is the world premiere recording of the work.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Mass in C Major KV317 , composed in 1779, needs little by way of introduction. The masterpiece here receives a fine interpretation by the Solisti Veneti conducted by Claudio Scimone.
The soprano Daniela Dessi died suddenly on 20th August 2016, aged 59. She was hailed by critics and colleagues as one of the finest voices the world of opera has ever known. Dynamic pays tribute to the great soprano with this recording, filmed just one year before her untimely death. Her performance of Giordano's Fedora was one of the pinnacles of her stunning artistic career. In the famous aria O grandi occhi lucenti from Act One, she delivers a technically perfect and emotionally passionate performance worthy of a great star.
The story takes place at the end of the 19th century, in St. Petersburg (Act One), Paris (Act Two) and Switzerland (Act Three). It's an operatic crime story, a drama of passion, revenge and guilt that unravels against a historical backdrop of Czarist Russia's political and ideological conflicts in the late 19th century.
Daniela Dessi is a complete prima donna of outstanding finesse, her rich voice both powerfully intense and deeply expressive. Tenor Fabio Armiliato shines particularly in the famous aria Amor ti vieta from Act Two, with a commanding and highly expressive stage presence in support of a powerful and wonderfully nuanced voice. The finale of the opera is reserved for the two protagonists, companions both on stage and in life. The...
The Neapolitan version of Rinaldo : the stages of its rediscovery.
In 1711 George Friedrich Handel's Rinaldo was premiered in London at the Queen's Theatre of Haymarket. The opera was immediately successful, thanks to the presence of a great interpreter in the role of the protagonist: the Neapolitan castrato Nicola Grimaldi . In 1718 Rinaldo arrived in Naples, where it was adapted by Leonardo Leo and an unknown librettist. In that period theatres would stage both new operas and popular works that were reworked where necessary.
Rinaldo was one of the latter: a pasticcio, or rather an opera impasticciata (a score consisting of pre-existing music and pieces
added for the occasion). Rarely was a score performed without being modified, because tastes and performing practices changed, as did the interpreters involved. The following table compares the London and Naples performers.
Based on the well-known mythological story narrated by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, this is a classical tale of jealousy and love. The giant Polyphemus tries to force his attention on the fair sea-nymph Galatea, who is in love with the shepherd Acis. When mad jealousy drives Polyphemus to kill his rival, Galatea asks her father Nereus to turn Acis' blood into a river so that, flowing into the sea, he will join her forevermore.
Agrippina was staged for the first time in late December 1709 - or possibly at the beginning of 1710 - at Venice's Teatro San Grisostomo and met with enormous success, as testified by twenty-seven following performances, a record number even for 18th-century standards. Agrippina 's triumph sanctioned Handel's definitive investiture as an operatic composer. After nearly 300 years this opera appears as a masterpiece of 18th-century music and an innovative work, considering that when Handel composed it he was just twenty-four years old. The composer's melodic creativity and sense of theatre are quite remarkable. The cast, conducted by Jean-Claude Malgoire, includes Vronique Gens in the title role.
On 8th January 1735 at the Covent Garden in London, George Frideric Handel presented his new opera Ariodante on a libretto anonymously adapted by Antonio Salvi and inspired by Ariosto. Handel produced a refined musical setting of a somewhat audacious title which he treated in an equally unusual manner: he eliminated the traditional scenes of wonder or magic, worked on following the psychological development of the individual characters and focus on privileged expressivity rather than virtuosity for its own sake giving prominence.
The mutual love of Princess Ginevra and Prince Ariodante of Fife has the full approval of her father, the King of Scotland. But Duke Polinesso covets the throne. An opera about truth and appearance, set by director John Pascoe in the 1950's, in the glamorous days of the British monarchy.
A classic work of its genre and historical period, Artaserse was premiered in Venice in 1730 by the most famous singers of the day: Farinelli in the role of the Arbace, Cuzzoni as Mandana and the castrato Nicolino as Artabano. It was a success for Hasse , who would, in 1740 and 1760, re-propose the same work in two different versions.
This video features one, in world premiere. The cast is extraordinary, with the countertenor Franco Fagioli giving a great performance of the role that was Farinelli's. Fagioli easily goes up and down the extension of more that three octaves, maintaning a uniform timbre and remarkable power and resonance. Also stunning, is the aria Pallido sole sung by Sonia Prina.
A journey in the fascinating world of a famous international violin competition, where heart and technique are needed to succeed. Follow the participants step by step till the exciting final stage. Hear the advice given to the young musicians by world-renowned violinists such as Gyorgy Pauk and Massimo Quarta, who won the competition in the past and are now members of the jury.
Violanta is anxious to avenge the death of her sister Norina, who committed suicide after being seduced and abandoned by Prince Alfonso. Violanta attracts Alfonso to her palace to have him killed by her husband, Simone Trovai, but once in his presence, she discovers a man tormented by unhappiness and remorse, and she falls in love with him. Aware that she cannot escape the fate of death, she will call Simone and receive the fatal blow in place of Alfonso.
Violanta is Korngold's second opera; the composer wrote it at the age of 17 (1914). The setting in an imaginary and decadent 15th century Venice reflects the fascination at that time for the Renaissance age and for the themes of passion and death. Korngold's music, with very refined orchestration, perfectly paints the contrast between the dark and deadly atmosphere of the oppressive world which Simone forces upon his wife, and the sudden glimpses of life, sensuality, and passion brought by Alfonso, making Violanta one of the masterpieces of the early 20th century.
Edouard Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys is based on an ancient Breton legend; even the choice of a subject based on legend - and a Breton one at that - illustrates the ideological link between Lalo's opera and the Wagnerianism so prevalent throughout Europe at the time. Lalo furthermore made use of various elements of popular music inspired by Breton folklore that give the entire score a special character and flavour.
Le Roi d'Ys contains all the ingredients of a fine romantic tale: love, jealousy, fear and a touch of magic. The story is well supported that is effective, full of colour and contrasts, with wonderful arias and duets, and a splendid overture. Patrick David conducts; Jean-Louis Pichon's creative staging includes special effects worthy of the seventh art.
Leonardo Leo's L'Alidoro was first staged at Teatro del Florentini with Gennaro Antonio Federico as his librettist. The opera was destined to reap success all over Europe with its Neapolitan music comedy theme. Frederico drafted a comedy in which the characters speak different languages (Neapolitan or Tuscan) according to their social status and work on different levels: one comic, the other serious.
L'Alidoro (Golden Wings) is a lost-and-found story that fathoms the themes of love and jealousy from different perspectives - those of age and social status in the forefront - interweaving comedy with more serious reflections. Recently rediscovered in the Abbey of Montecassino along with three other Leonardo Leo operas, Alidoro was chosen by Antonio Florio for his Pieta de' Turchini, one of the best Italian Baroque orchestras of the last twenty years.
An opera with a rich vein of musical ideas, sumptuous and original sets, a little-known German Romantic composer, high-level interpreters (among them Anna Caterina Antonacci): these are the ingredients of Hans Heiling, staged in 2004 in Cagliari under the scrupulous and refined baton of Renato Palumbo. There is no doubt that this timeless story of gnomes and spirits, love and suffering, supernatural powers and mortal beauty will captivate many opera lovers.
Mascagni's first and most successful work has become an opera classic as it features elements of the Greek tragedy, mixing up religious and archaic elements. It's a story of love, passion, jealousy and restored honor in bloodshed.
Directors Di Gangi and Giacomazzi set this traditional Cavalleria in a Sicilian village of the 1940s where the buildings are rather bare and the piazza is the stage for private as well as public drama. Conductor Valerio Galli is at the head of the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, one of the best in Italy. Good performance reviews for the whole cast.
Inspired by Francis de Croisset three-act comedy with the same title, Jules Massenet's Cherubin was completed in 1903. The stimuli that led Massenet to write an opera of eighteenth-century reminiscences may have been many and gave gone beyond the immediate enthusiasm he felt for Croisset's play. We might consider, for example, the fact that in the thirty year period between the 1880s and the first world war, Mozart was very fashionable in France.
The old Mozartian Cherubino of Le nozze di Figaro is no longer the young lad in his first naive contacts with women: his age moved on from 13 to 17 years and, of course, takes on more adolescent connotations: more hot-headed, impetuous, ephemeral and passionate. Massenet brings these aspects out well as he characterises Cherubin with vocal scoring that favours ample, intensely cantabile phrases, with leaps towards the acute register that give full vent to the lyrical soprano voice, with moments of sudden emphasis and equally rapid disappointments - a real tempest of hormones, light years away from the Voi che sapete of Mozart's page boy.
Finished in 1910, Don Quichotte was a success when it premiered at the Opera Theatre in Monte Carlo, where sixty-seven year old Massenet had gone to seek relief from the rheumatism he suffered from. The subject from Cervantes's masterpiece, had been versified by the young and extravagant writer Jacques Le Lorrain. The story is quite different from that of Miguel de Cervantes's hero, appearing, rather, as a self-portrait of the poet himself: the knight becomes a model of virtue, of generosity, driven by lofty ideals; Dulcinee, from maid in an inn becomes a women of the world. His text was reworked by the librettist Henri Cain and submitted to Massenet, who, despite the difficult period he was going through, conceived a rich score, full of verve and maturity.
Manon is Jules Massenet's most popular and enduring opera which, having "quickly conquered the world's stages", has maintained an important place in the repertory since its creation. It is the quintessential example of the charm and vitality of the music and culture of the Parisian Belle Epoque.
Casted as Manon, Annick Massis together with Alessandro Liberatore on his debut as De Grieux, the opera was a mainstay of the Opera-Comique in Paris, reaching its 1,000th performance there in 1919.
Giovanni Simone Mayr was a musician of great success at the beginning of the 19th century. Medea in Corinto is one of his best operas. It was premiered at the San Carlo theatre in Naples in 1813, on a libretto by Felice Romani, and for decades it was one of the fortes of Isabella Colbran and Giuditta Pasta. Benedetto Sicca's direction has a great emotional impact, as have the distinctive and practiced performances of all the artists involved.
Fabio Luisi gives an intense reading of Mayr's music and masterfully underlines its deep psychological implications, while at the same time keeping in constant contact with the stage in a dramatic and enthusing crescendo. He is a Grammy Award-winning Italian conductor; principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and General Music Director of the Zurich Opera. Two great tenors are in the important roles of Jason and Aegeus: Michael Spyres and Enea Scala. Medea is entrusted to the Spaniard Davinia Rodriguez, who easily tackles even the difficult cavatina with obbligato violin of Act I, traditionally almost always omitted.
Written almost two centuries ago by Saverio Mercadante , coveted by many theatres of the day, Francesca da Rimini was, in fact, never staged. Every time it was scheduled for performance, something happened and it got canceled. A long series of incidents prevented it from reaching the stage for as any 185 years. Its forgotten manuscript, which was only known for its ill-starred fate, suddenly re-emerged five years ago in Madrid, the city where it was to have been premiered in 1831.
The soprano Leonor Bonilla (Francesca) is quite impressive in the part of the protagonist: she portrays the character's psychological frailty as well as her determination with a steely vocal technique, spinning out incredible modulations, displaying strong and dazzling vocalizations, easily soaring into the high register and flaunting such an attractive, casual and poignant stage presence that she even dares moving some dance steps with the corps de ballet.
Aya Wakizono is an admirable Paolo: endowed with a superb mezzo voice, she seeks and achieves consistency throughout the range is virtuosic in the coloratura, and fluent. No less demanding is the part of the tenor Lanciotto, with its fearful leaps and ornamentation worthy of the Neapolitan Rossini: Mert Sungu might in time get rid of a touch...
Margherita D'Anjou was Giacomo Meyerbeer's fourth opera in Italian and his first true success. After an absence from the stage of one and a half centuries, it returned at the 43rd Valle d'Itria Festival in an exemplary production: the ironical setting of the director Talevi - the War of the Roses takes place at the London Fashion Week - is perfectly matched by the elegant direction of Luisi, at the head of the Orchestra Internazionale d'Italia.
The opera, which belongs to the semi-serious genre, moves from the warlike tones of Act One to the idyllic ones of Act Two, where both female protagonist appear: the queen, a soprano, and the wife, a contralto; both seeking the love of a heroic tenor equally daring in battle and in music.
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In some respects, Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) is to the history of Italian opera what Dante's Divine Comedy is to the history of Italian literature: a masterpiece that stands at the very beginning of the journey. With Orfeo and the operas that followed it, Monteverdi had the substantial merit of immediately demonstrating the infinite possibilities of this new genre, which would leave an imprint on three centuries of European culture. In the present edition the French conductor Jean-Claude Malgoire is at the head of a cast of Baroque opera specialists.
Even though in recent years Idomeneo has been staged more frequently, this Mozart masterpiece can hardly be counted among the operas (the Da Ponte trilogy in primis) that made of the Salzburg composer one of the greatest operatic composers of all times. Yet Idomeneo was, in its day, a revolutionary work, animated by music that appears remarkably innovative and profoundly theatrical.
Modest Mussorgsky Boris Godunov was performed in the open air and for the first time in front of St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia. This spectacular production, also performed in front of the very same cathedral in the summer of 2014, 90 years after the building's consecration, was conceived by Plamen Kartaloff, the director of Sofia Opera and dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Boris Christoff and to the 85th anniversary of the birth of Nicolai Ghiaurov, both world-renowned for their interpretations of the role of Boris.
Les Contes d'Hoffmann is a great, unfinished masterpiece. In 1880 Offenbach's health began to deteriorate rapidly. Les Contes d'Hoffmann had already been programmed for the 1880/81 season of the Opra-Comique, but Offenbach was having a hard time finishing it and worked only in the moments of respite from his illness. He died on 5 October, leaving the opera incomplete (we still do not know to what extent). And so Ernest Guiraud, a "specialist" who had already transformed into recitatives the spoken parts of Bizet's Carmen , was called to finish the task. The opera was first staged at the Opra-Comique on 10 February 1881 and met with great success. Soon it was being performed in the most important theatres of the world.
This edition has an Italian cast of exceptional quality, in which stand out the amazing voice of Desire Rancatore, the extraordinary artistry of Ruggiero Raimondi and the fascinating direction of Pier Luigi Pizzi, one of today's most creative directors.
Un mari a la porte was premiered at the Bouffes-Parisiens on 22nd June 1859 and, chronologically, comes between two masterpieces such as Orphee aux enfers (21st October 1858) and Genevieve de Brabant (11th November 1859).
The libretto by Delacour and Morand offers a plot based on misunderstandings and misconceptions, something which characterized much of the contemporary French theatre and which would find its apotheosis, towards the end of the century, in the pochade and in Georges Feydeau's operas, in which, however the erotic and mischievous element always plays a prominent role that here is only present at the beginning (on his wedding night, Henri Martel, Suzanne's husband, wants to go into his bedroom but finds the door locked, because a debtor of his, a certain Florestan Ducroquet, has hidden in it and thrown the key out of the window).
In November 1957, while the Berliner Philharmoniker were on tour in Japan, Karajan proposed some of the best works in his repertoire, starting with the Prelude to Die Meistersinger by Wagner and continuing with Richard Strauss' Don Juan and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - the "symphony" par excellence which he had on November 1954 for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Tom Jones is universally considered one of Philidor's best operas and one of the most perfect examples of a music genre that was quite popular in 18th-century France, the Opera-comique. The libretto is derived from Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a foundling, while the music, with its succession of dialogues, airs, ariettes, and ensembles is truly delightful, embodying the elegant and caustic spirit of the Age of Enlightenment.
On the podium of this Tom Jones, staged at Lausanne's Opera in the summer of 2005, is one of the greatest specialists of French 17th 18th- century music, Jean-Claude Malgoire, who thus continues his collaboration with Dynamic, which already counts several prestigious titles both on CD and video.
The program of this Lazar Berman recital recorded in Tokyo in 1988 collects some of the artists most authoritative performances. From Ii>Schumann's Sonata in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 11 to Liszt's Annees de pelerinage and transcription pieces of famous composers such as Wagner and Rachmaninov's Moments musicaux , Berman played a perfect and memorable performance.
A rarely performed opera, Ponchielli's La Gioconda is one his famous and well-loved work. Although the first version suffered from Ponchielli's doubts and uncertainties: on the one hand the musician was convinced, for example, that the libretto was too long and complex,to the detriment of the music, and that many parts are not developed the way it should be. This reason, did not stop the composer as well as the opera to garner so much praise during its premiere at Milan's La Scala. In the end, after experiencing radical changes that lasted for twenty six years in the making, the changes contributed to consolidate its literally and musical substance, sanctioning the works's definitive and long lasting success.
Nicola Porpora was a composer who helped to turn Italian opera into the most successful and spectacular genre in Europe. One of the few luminaries of the 'Neapolitan School' to actually be born in Naples, Porpora wrote L'Angelica , a serenade for six voices and instruments, to a libretto by the young Pietro Metastasio in 1720. The work was composed for the birthday of Empress Elizabeth Christine, wife of Charles VI, and its plot is comedic, focusing on the travails of a couple in love. The opera's success was immediate, resulting in the commissioning of further works that would lead to ever more glamorous successes for Porpora in Venice, London, Dresden and Vienna.
For Puccini, La Boheme was not just an eternal love story. The subject of his opera is time. The passing of time; the memory of time that will never live again. And we tell the music of the fourth act. In a succession of nostalgic variations that return to the themes of the first act. - Jean-Michel Folon (Torre del Lago, July 2003)
On the anniversary of the first success of Madama Butterfly in Brescia on 28 May 1904, Placido Domingo conducted, from the podium of Torre del Lago Puccini, Daniela Dess, Fabio Armilato and Juan Pons in a new production by Stefano Monti with sets designed by Arnaldo Pomodoro and costumes of Maison Gattinoni.
Madam Butterfly is without doubt Giacomo Puccini's most beloved and performed opera, and opera that has captivated and touched the audiences of the whole world. This production was filmed in Torre del Lago, in the opera-air theatre on the shores of the peaceful Tuscan lake where Puccini liked to retreat.
Although one of his most consistently lyrical operas, La rondine (The Swallow) remains one of Puccini's least known. Dissatisfied with the result of his work, Puccini wrote three versions, with two different endings, and continued to make further revisions up to his death in 1924. The innovative 2007 production at the Torre del Lago Giacomo Puccini Festiva, presented on this video, is in effect a fourth version, which combines Acts I and II of the first version (1917), with Lorenzo Ferrero's 1994 orchestration of parts of the Finale of Act III of the incomplete third version (1921), some of which had survived only in piano score, as well as Ruggero's Act I romanza, Parigi e la citta dei desideri , from the second version (1920).
With a sparkling score reminiscent of Franz Lehar and Richard Strauss, La rondine, set in mid-19th century Paris, tells the story of Magda De Civry, a young courtesan who falls in love one evening with Ruggero Lastouc, the handsome son of a childhood friend her protector, Rambaldo Fernandez. Although Magda believes that her compromised social position prevents their marrying, in Puccini's third version it is Ruggero who leaves Magda when he discovers that she is the mistress of Rambaldo.
Giacomo Puccini's fifth opera was first staged at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in 14th January 1900. Tosca is an opera that arouses powerful feelings, written by a musician who excelled in the characterisation of weak figures. It is one of the most popular of Puccini's works, for it successfully conveys the irresistible force of elemental emotions and passions: jealousy, desire, love of life, despair in the face of death. In this sense Tosca is much more like the "desperate passion" of Manon Lescaut than the crepuscular intimism of Boheme .
Le Villi is an opera-ballet in two acts that marked Giacomo Puccini's debut in the world of opera. It was first staged at Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1884. Librettist Ferdinando Fontana based the story on the ancient legend of the Willis, fantastic creatures representing the souls of young women who were the victims of love.
Anna and Roberto are engaged, but during a trip the man is seduced by a woman and his fianc?e dies of heartbreak. Roberto, who is by then abandoned and left penniless, is haunted by remorse and attacked by the revengeful fairies and Anna's ghost.
All the elements of the more mature Puccini are already recognizable: the characters of Anna and Roberto anticipate the "love victim" and the "man without qualities" archetypes of his later operas, whereas some of the composer's touches of harmony and aria structure foresee his future success.
The Invisible City of Kitezh , completed in 1905, is a remarkable opera that fuses folklore, mysticism and realism. Its subject is the story of the advancing Mongol army's entry to Great Kitezh and the city's subsequent miraculous survival. Rejecting archaisms and the more religiously inclined suggestions of his librettist, Rimsky-Korsakov sought to create an opera that is "contemporary and even fairly advanced". It is therefore through-composed, hinting at times at Wagnerian procedure, and flooded with the composer's rich, apt and brilliant orchestral palette, fully supportive of the powerful vocal writing.
First performed at the Teatro Regio, Turin, on 5 March 1876, Lauro Rossi's penultimate opera Cleopatra caught the public's attention in the wake of Verdi's Aida (1871). Like that better-known work, it contains some wonderful arias and set pieces, including a marvelous Act I banquet scene, Cleopatra's Act II aria, the thrilling ensemble that closes Act III, and the confrontation between Cleopatra and Octavian in Act IV, all making for compelling viewing and listening. From the brooding opening scene in which Diomedes foretells the fall of Egypt to Cleopatra's death scene, this gripping grand opera by one of Italy's forgotten masters springs vividly to life in this revival filmed at the 2008 Macerata Sferisterio Festival
The Opera Vlaanderen of Antwerp continues its Rossini Cycle under the musical direction of conductor Alberto Zedda, with the rarely performed opera Armida . Armida is clearly a tenor opera par excellence, as there are four tenors among its main roles, here interpreted by Enea Scala, Robert McPherson, Dario Schmunck and the young Adam Smith.
Director Marianne Clement and her customary set designer Julia Hansen have returned to the Opera Vlaanderen after the successful Giasone by Cavalli released by Dynamic. Here they take a critical look of the world of the noble and heroic knightly ideals are cast aside. However, love here turns into a destructive frenzy.
At the apex of his career, Rossini accepted a commission from La Scala to produce a new title. The new opera entitled Bianca e Falliero would open the Carnival season on 26th December 1819. Reaping great success with audiences but received contrasting review, some of them outright negative, Bianca e Falliero is a story of Falliero, hero coming back after a successful battle only to find that his love, Bianca has been arranged to marry somebody else.
The present video is the first authorized video publication of an ROF productions. Among the many and unquestionable merits of this festival are its high-quality stagings, which are reference points in the history of the production of Rossini's operas. Bianca e Falliero returns, this time, in an intimate and iconic interpretation that stands poles apart from that of Pizzi, and is inspired by Venetian Renaissance paintings, with an explicit reference to the works of Veronese.
The first opera to be staged at the recently reconstructed Petruzzelli theatre of Bari, this Cenerentola shines with the bravura and comic verve of its interpreters. Daniele Abbado's direction and Evelino Pido's conducting bring out the best of this opera, which for much of the 19th century vied with Il barbiere di Siviglia as Rossini's most popular and most frequently performed comic opera.
L'equivoco stravagante was written on 1811 and its Rossini's first two-act comic opera, the only one written for a theatre in Bologna (his adoptive home after he abandoned Pesaro). A truly peculiar opera; not so much in its music but with the text written by Gaetano Gasbarri which led the work being ostracised from theaters for nearly two centuries.
L'equivoco stravagante stages the classic situation of the young girl who does not intend to be wedded to the traditional rich braggart but prefers a timid young man who is short of money; this time the expedient used to drive off the undesired wooer is to have him believe that in reality the girl is a young boy who has been castrated - or in the euphemistic parlance of the time a musico . Seasoned with fanciful language, made up of bold neologisms and licentious double meanings, with expressions that are in turn silly, absurd, or hyperbolic, Gasbarri's libretto offers no few aspects of modernity, while Rossini's music already contains the melodic invention, the frenzied rhythm, the musical electricity that within just a few months were to project the composer unstoppably towards worldwide success.
Ermione is an opera of string colours, dominated by violent, shifting feelings, with passages of remarkable dramatic intensity and vivid pathos, rendered with masterly skill by the performers in this edition from the Rossini Opera Festival. The subject was taken from Jean-Baptiste Racine's tragedy Andromaque (1667) and the libretto was written by prolific librettist Andrea Leone Tottola . It premiered at the San Carlo Theatre in Naples on 27th March 1819 but was not a success for it was withdrawn after only seven performances until it was revived in concert form in Sienna on 22nd August 1987.
Together with librettist, Giovanni Gherardini, Rossini opened La gazza ladra at Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 31st March 1817. The opera was a success from its premiere and deservedly entered the already substantial catalogue of Rossini's works and, at the same time, generated a new group - the semi-serious genre. With La gazza ladra Rossini succeeds in mixing comic-sentimental and dramatic elements, thus achieving a music style which is enriched, modulated to suit events, forerunning an aesthetic ideal that was to be formalised some years later. The brilliant, rousing ouverture was made famous thanks to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's motion picture A Clockwork Orange .
The story, inspired by a sad event that had really happened, is based on a rather complex plot but does have a happy ending, and exploits mainly a weepy, pathetic tone, concentrating on the character of Ninetta, who is innocent but considered guilty.
Misunderstandings and plot twists abound in this opera buffa. The Opera Royal de Wallonie (ORW) ended its 2014 season with La Gazzetta , a comic opera by Gioachino Rossini taken from a play by Carlo Goldoni . This Liege production of the 1816 opera was directed by Stefano Mazzonis di Pralafera. The plot revolves around the bizarre idea of a man who decides to find a husband for his daughter through an ad in a newspaper. This production includes, for the first time, a quintet found In 2012 by the librarian of Palermo's Conservatory: authenticated by US musicologist Philp Gosset, it has been given back its rightful place in Act One of Rossini's opera.
This production of L'inganno felice , a semi-serious opera that is quite popular also in our day, was recorded in the summer of 2015 at the Rossini in Wildbad Opera Festival. The performance had a resounding success, thanks to the direction of Jochen Schonleber, the vigorous conducting of Antonino Fogliani and the presence of the bass Lorenzo Regazzo in the role of Tarabotto, the true star of the soiree, supported by a splendid Silvia Della Benetta as Isabella.
When the 21-year-old Gioachino Rossini wrote his L'Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) for Venice in 1813 he had already made his debut as an opera composer two and a half years earlier, yet this was his tenth opera-a quarter of all the operas which he was to write up to 1829.
The opera portrays the adventures of the astute Isabella, Italian prisoner of the sultan Mustapha, who has wearied of his docile, submissive wives and seeks a new wife who can stand up to him: in this Isabella succeeds all to well, wrapping the sultan around here finger and then reducing him to despair as she finally returns to Italy with her beloved Lindoro and suitor Taddeo. Alongside the dizzying speeds of its action, the opera contains an element that is wholly new for the Italian stages of the day: pervasive, at times even explicit, sexual allusion, starting with Isabella's aria Cruel lot, tyrannous love (All men want it/all men ask for it/happiness/from a fair woman).
The composition of Semiramide took approximately four months, which is an unusually long span for Rossini . The premiere took place on the 3rd of February 1823. The opera's libretto is based on Voltaire's drama Semiramis , written by the French philosopher and scholar in 1748. For some respects a conclusive works, Semiramide contains, like all masterpieces, traditional elements alongside innovative ones.
Rossini accentuated the role of the orchestra, compared to his previous serious operas: the Sinfonia, the longest and most elaborate Rossini ever wrote, immediately suggests Rossini endeavoured to give the instrumental part a more important role yet than usual. At the same time, the bel canto dimension is probably more developed than in any other previous Rossinian serious opera. Indeed even recently, the difficulty of finding interpreters up to tackling Rossini's vocal writing, often prohibitively difficult, has contributed to the few and far between performances of this masterpieces. The role of Semiramide calls for a singer with qualities both of dramatic and coloratura soprano; bel canto agility is, in any case, required of all the main interpreters of this opera. This is a huge opera from all points of view. It summarizes and completes Rossini's serious arc, and is...
Filmed live in 2007 at the prestigious Rossini Opera Festival in the composer's birthplace, Pesaro, Il Turco in Italia is a madcap ensemble opera with an inspired score that boasts music of both comic genius and extraordinary beauty.
Set in Naples, it spins crazy late around a poet who uses the romantic entanglements of the inhabitants with a Turkish prince as inspiration for the plot of his next play. Ultimately, life imitates art as all ends happily, but not before a planned abduction leads to chaotic situation of mistaken identity.
Domenico Scarlatti's La Dirindina and Albinoni's Pimpinone are two intermezzi buffi, which were comic operatic interludes inserted between acts or scenes of an opera seria. Pimpinone was performed for the first time in Venice in 1708, as the interlude for Astarto , Albinoni's own opera seria.
The work was an immediate success and was given many further performances, both in Italy and abroad. La Dirindina was composed seven years later, in 1715, by Domenico Scarlatti, son of Alessandro. Both intermezzi are premiere video recordings, filmed in high definition of 16:9 aspect ratio with stereo PCM sound.
Most of Schubert's operas were written without a specific commission, in the hope that, once completed, some theatre might find them interesting simply by virtue of their musical value. This unrealistic optimism proved almost always wrong and Schubert suffered bitter disappointments, very often working for nothing. Begun on 20 September 1821, Alfonso und Estrella was completed on 27 February 1822 but was first staged, on the initiative of Franz Liszt, only in 1854, after Schubert's death. Alfonso und Estrella has the characteristic climate of a romantische Oper. If it is true that Schubert lacks the sense of theatre which is typical of the best operatic composers of his day (for example Weber), the power of his creativity and beauty of many arias cannot be denied.
Milan's la Scala theatre as told by the protagonists of its golden years, interviewed by the renowned Italian journalist Enzo Biagi . A series originally produced on 16mm film, now restored and offered to the public at large by Accasfilm.
Milan's La Scala theatre as told by the protagonists of its golden years.
Enzo Biagi was one of the Italy's most famous and beloved journalists. His fondness of the prestigious Milanese venue led to the programmes presented now but was made in 1981 to 1982. Documenting the La Scala productions of those years, Biagi entered the theatre during the rehearsals and interviewed not only the conductors, singers and directors of the time, but also some of the great stars of the past.
Milan's La Scala theatre as told by the protagonists of its golden years.
Enzo Biagi was one of the Italy's most famous and beloved journalists. His fondness of the prestigious Milanese venue led to the programmes presented now but was made in 1981 to 1982. Documenting the La Scala productions of those years, Biagi entered the theatre during the rehearsals and interviewed not only the conductors, singers and directors of the time, but also some of the great stars of the past.
Il Corsaro is still one of Verdi's less known and performed operas. Chronologically speaking, it belongs to the famous "years in the galley", even though it dates from a period (the autumn of 1848) when the composer's name, in Italy, could already be considered established. Although this is considered one of Verdi's minor works, there are many exciting and poignant passages in it, and the tight dramatic action makes for music that has a pressing and incisive rhythm. The renowned baritone Renato Bruson and conductor Renato Palumbo stand out in the cast and this recording makes the most of Lamberto Puggelli's beautiful sets.
First performed in French at the Paris Opera in 1867, Don Carlo is in may ways an amazingly innovative work. The opera seems to underline Giuseppe Verdi's shift from the Manichean division between good and evil, which had been a clear, structural element of his dramaturgy up to that point in his career.
In this opera, Verdi assembles all his mainstay music theatre themes: power, with its honours and burdens; the contrasts of impossible love; the conflict between father and son; and an oppressed people demanding freedom.
Verdi radically revised the score in 1883, using an Italian libretto and reducing the opera from five acts to four. The popularity of Don Carlo has grown unremittingly ever since, with today's critics almost unanimously recognising it as one of Verdi's greatest masterpieces, an opera that continues to reveal new gems.
Daniel Oren if fully in control on the podium, ensuring unanimity between orchestra and singers. The maestro softens the dark tones of the score, which are well reflected in the visuals, choosing instead to emphasise the various changes of mood.
The premiere of Ernani at Venices' Teatro La Fenice in 1844 failed to come up to Verdi's expectations, primarily because of the poor health of some of the singers. Both critics and audiences, however, soon warmed to Ernani , especially after the following performances. The opera contains some of Verdi's most successful, impassioned arias (first and foremost Elvira's cavatina and Silva's cantabile) and clearly denoted an evolution in terms of dramatic structure, more cohesive and with lesser use of blocks of closed numbers. Despite a turbulent 'premiere', Ernani became a real international success, beginning with the felicitous Vienna productions of May/June 1844. The cast of this Teatro Regio of Parma production features some of today's best singers for this type of repertoire.
The nearly eighty-year-old Verdi debuted Falstaff at La Scala on the 9th of February 1893. Based on the play The Merry Wives of Windsor , Falstaff was Verdi's last opera, which covered nearly fifty-four years of creative activity and the most perfect enigmatic work ever composed by the musician from Busseto.
Boito Arrigo skillfully preserved his original traits, converging them into a libretto that is agile, concise and imaginative. His Falstaff is not a solely comical figure; he is a complex character with a cynical outlook on life.
It all started with an agreement with the Russian music authorities and on the suggestion of Mauro Corticelli (an impresario from Bologna), to asked the composer to write a new opera for the imperial theatre. Verdi choose Don Alvaro o La fuerza de sino by the Spaniard Angel Perez de Saavedra for his subject and libretto and contacted to Piave to set the work right away.
On the evening of 10th November 1862 La forza del destino was finally staged at St. Petersburg's Imperial Theatre, obtaining resounding success. The performance was "excellent", according to what Verdi wrote to Tito Ricordi in his telegraphic account of the soirre. The Czar Alexander II, who could not see the first performances due to illness, attended on the fourth evening, and summoned the Maestro to congratulate him in person. La forza del destino is, indeed an experimental creation by a composer who was already mature but still looking for new incentives and challenges.
Giovanna d'Arco , Verdi's seventh opera, was premiered at La Scala in Milan on 15th February, 1845. It was written between the composition of I Due Foscari (November 1844) and Alzira (August 1845), a period when Verdi was already enjoying popularity as a recognized heir to Bellini and Donizetti. After the success of Nabucco, which had launched him on the Italian operatic scene, the Venetian triumph of Ernani cemented Verdi's repuation as a composer of international stature, both of home and abroad.
This opera undoubtedly marks an important turning point in Verdi's operatic writing, because it brings to the foreground the characters' introspective, psychological aspect, which would be the fundamental feature of most of the maestro's later creations.
This recording documents the production staged at Novara's Teatro Coccia during the 2013-2014 season, with Dario Argento tackling for the first time the direction of an opera.
The outstanding and deeply touching performance of Verdi's Messa da Requiem was recorded at the Parco Ducale of Parma, within the 2020 Edition of Festival Verdi. The concert was dedicated to the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the health workers engaged in the emergency.
Here are conductor Roberto Abbado's words to describe this Verdian masterpiece: "I think that Verdi felt the need to compose a sacred work to deal with some themes that, as he got older, he felt very strongly about. They are themes that every human being sooner or later asks themselves. Verdi is not afraid to show that he fears death, and therefore his approach is extremely humble and human, showing some of the frailties we all have. How does the Messa da Requiem end? It ends, in my opinion, with a huge question mark. Basically, I believe, Verdi, like many of us, cannot answer these questions. I, myself, cannot answer them."
Nabucco was premiered at Milan's La Scala on March 9, 1842. It met with enormous success, crowned by as many as 75 performances at La Scala before the end of that year. With Nabucco Giuseppe Verdi finally found his own stance, attaining linguistic and expressive means that, in the space of a decade, would make him the undisputed master of Italian opera theaters.
The present, interesting production, staged at the Carlo Felice theater in Genoa, features young but already internationally renowned interpreters: Alberto Gazale, as a solid and convincing Nabucco; Susan Neves as an Abigaille by the beautiful and powerful vocal means; Orlin Anastassov as a greatly authoritative Zaccaria, which lets foresee for him a radiant career.
The winnder of the Campoamor Prize as best 2015 production, this Otello - a Macerate Opera Festival and Festival Castell de Peralada coproduction - was entrusted to a star of the current direction firmanent, the Spanish director and set designer Paco Azorin, and conducted by Riccardo Frizza.
Frizza gives back to this Verdi score all of its beauty, its refined orchestral and harmonic writing, at the same time leading with confidence the singers: the solid Othello of the American tenor Stuart Neill, an imposing figure and a very interesting voice, rich in nuances; the lyrical Desdemona of Jessica Nuccio, debuting in this role; and the excellent Jago of Roberto Frontali, a fine Sferisterio, also thanks to an inspiring use of lighting and projections
In 14th-century Genoa, where different political fractions are at war. Paolo Albiani has the valiant corsair Simone Boccanegra , a righteous and sage man, elected Doge.
The political conspiracies, in the opera's plot, are closely knit together with the tragic events in Simone's life: he has lost both the love of his life and their daughter, and must constantly defend himself from his enemies' attacks. The true protagonists of Verdi's opera, however, are not the social and political events: but rather a pervading sense of tragedy and melancholy, and the characters' intricate psychology.
Giuseppe Verdi's Stiffelio is a tense moral drama in which a Protestant minister learns of his wife's betrayal and is torn between a thirst for revenge and his religious duty of forgiveness. These themes of adultery and divorce were social taboos in 1850, and Stiffelio was met with such censorship and disapproval that it was soon withdrawn.
Today we can appreciate both the title character's significance as the first true Verdi tenor, and the many wonderful moments in this 'most unjustly neglected of Verdi's operas'.
Although not a success like the La Traviata when it premiered on 6th March 1854, Verdi's Rigoletto is considered, in Italy at least, as by far his most popular opera up to this date. With the text written by Francesco Maria Piave , the plot found much of its interest and its emotive impact on the public in the fact that the events it related were "real life" of the day.
La traviata is one of the works that mark the entrance of realism in Italian opera. Although, as can be expected, some of the more scabrous moments that deal with prostitution are toned down (a toning down already made by Dumas in his passage from novel to play), it is significant that the libretto, initially entitled Amore e morte (Love and death) was renamed by Verdi La traviata .
In spite of the fact that he had to accept moving the story to an earlier age, there is no doubt that the opera speaks of contemporary society, of the mundane world of the bourgeoisie, emphasizing its vulgarity and exposing its hypocrisy.
Written for exceptional singers, Il Trovatore has remained popular ever since its first performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome on 19 January 1953, when even the toughest critics were convinced of its place in the repertoire. People are attracted to Il Trovatore because of its rousing melodies, its brutal, powerful plot, and its simple structure: elements that make it one of the best examples of Verdi's theatre pieces.
After the great success that Il Trovatore received in Paris, Verdi was proposed to compose a French version of the opera to suit the tastes of the local public. The original work, based on the Spanish play El trovador by Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, had a libretto by Cammarano, which was translated into French by Emilien Pacini.
Le Trouvere was first staged in Brussels in 1856 and premiered at the Paris Opera in 1857. In this new version the composer added some music in act 3 for the gypsie ballet scene, extended the finale of act 4 and made several other revisions. The plot is highly dramatic and captivating: Verdi portrays strong characters who deal with war, obsession and revenge.
To use director Robert Wilson's words "this is a family tragedy, and in many ways, it is a very contemporary story." Wilson's approach to the opera aims at preserving its emotional strength by using a very essential decor, whose main element is light: "As a director, when I design the stage and lighting, I think about if what I see can help me hear better. Le Trouvere requires a tremendous amount of concentration, so the set I designed is abstract in order to create a space for the music in the Farnese. I have designed an environment in concrete, creating a juxtaposition to the theatre's...
Les vepres siciliennes , a five-act opera on a libretto by Eugene Scribe and Charles Duveyrier with music by Giuseppe Verdi , was first staged at the Paris Opera on 13th June 1855. The subject of the opera was nothing other than an adaptation of a libretto that Scribe had written some years before. At first the opera was greeted with great success, even Hector Berlioz , usually far from kind to Italian musicians, exalted the grandeur of its conception and its masterly composition. However its Parisian success was to be short lived, and after 1865 Les vepres siciliennes disappeared from the repertoire of the Opera.
Partenope with the maiden was one of the three sirens defeated by Ulysses, whose body washed ashore in the spot where Naples was founded. Or was she the Greek princess of the libretto. who founded a city that took her name and successfully defended it against the neighbouring Cumaeans? Set to music by a number of composers - such as Caldara, Hasse, Sarro, Handel and Vivaldi - the myth of Partenope was very popular and known in as many as sixteen different versions. Neapolitans, even today, call themselves "partenopei", "children of Parthenope". A rich and colourful production, entrusted to world-renowned specialists of the Baroque repertoire and with the added value of the some very comic intermezzi, as was customary in 18th-century music theatre.
The city of Cremona immediately evokes the violin and the great families of violin makers who, since the end of the 16th century and for many generations, made it world famous.
In this documentary, Italian violinist Salvatore Accardo is joined by Andrea Mosconi, President of the Stradivari Museum, and by violin makers Francesco Bissolotti and Bruce Carlson in a fascinating journey of this Cremonese traditional craftsmanship.
The world premiere performance of a lost Vivaldi masterpiece, Ercole su'l Termodonte reconstructed by Alessandro Ciccolini and edited by Alan Curtis, directed and designed by John Pascoe for the Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi.
Il Farnace is the most written and re-proposed of Antonio Vivaldi's operas, it's like a beloved child who worries his father, and to whom the parent always wants to give the best. Versions of Farnace , two in 1727 and one each in 1730, 1731 and 1732, had been conceived and adapted to the different circumstances for Venice, Prague, Pavia and Mantua, always with a cast to Vivaldi's satisfaction and with the composer in control of the production.
The greatest appreciation of Vivaldi's operatic music was expressed in a letter by a spectator of the 1727 Carnival season, the abbot Antonio Conti . He wrote to Madamde de Caylus that of all the operas of the Venice season he like best Farnace because its music was very varied, "between the sublime and the tender", and because Vivaldi's pupil worked wonders.
L'incoronazione di Dario is a musical drama in three acts that Vivaldi wrote in 1717 with a libretto by Adriano Morselli. The intricate plot is about the conflict between Dario, Oronte and Arpago for the succession to the throne after Ciro, king of the Persians. Having faced deceptions, betrayals and subterfuge, only Dario succeeds in becoming the new king of the Persians, and thus at the same time, crowning his love for Statira, daughter of Ciro and sister of the treacherous Argene, a dangerous princess ready to do anything to satisfy her thirst for power.
Directing the Complesso Barocco and a vocal cast of specialists, Alan Curtis, one of the world's greatest experts on Vivaldi operas, brings a recently rediscovered masterpiece of the Red Priest's, offered here for the time. Motezuma , first staged at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice in autumn 1733, is one of the operas of Vivaldi's full maturity. The score was long thought lost, but the fortunate rediscovery in 2002 of a large majority of the original music, some of it in fragmentary form, has allowed the expert Alessandro Ciccolini to produce a reconstruction that is reliable and true to the Venetian composer's original intentions.
It tells the gripping stories of Mitrena and Montezuma, and of Teutile and Ramiro, and particularly the trials of Fernando Cortez in conquest, set against Montezuma's love for his own people, stimulated the imaginations of many composers.
In the course of Franco Corelli's long artistic career, year 1971 was an important one. The tenor, then at the apex of his international fame, turned fifty, twenty years of which had been spent busily active on stage. Few opera singers, in the 20th century, could compare with him for passion, variety of repertoire and quality of interpretation. These short but memorable performances wish to trace the most important stages his incredible artistic parabola, during which the Italian singer appeared beside the all the greatest protagonists of the operatic world
Edgardo the Duke of Mantua, Federico, Werther, Des Grieux, Hoffmann, Romeo: the aroas of this Las Palmas recital are flashbacks of a career, of a style and an interpreter that were out of the ordinary.
At the age of 69 the voice of Alfred Kraus is unchanged; time has only dimmed a few notes. His still flawless technique and dedication to the repertoire, which he has built up and preserved with determination, allow him to tackle demanding pieces with results to absolute excellence.
The recital featured on this video dates back to 1984 and photographs a Renata Scotto in her full artistic maturity. At the time of the singer was 50 years old, 32 of which she spent on stage. The programme is vast and varied in epochs, styles and composers and shows the elasticity of an artistic of solid technique gifted with absolutely extraordinary musicality.
Alongside famous pages of opera, like Lascia ch'io pianga from Handel's Rinaldo or Tu che la vanita from Verdi's Don Carlo , Renata Scotto tackles lesser-known pages, like the beautiful Petrarchan sonnets by Franz Liszt in 1844/45. Here perhaps the artist gives the best of herself, exhibiting a palette of colours that is truly rich in nuances and dazzling control of vocal emission. At the end of this demanding programme, based chiefly on chamber music, Renata Scotto offers four encores, tow of which are dedicated to Puccini operas Tosca and Butterfly shrewdly kept back for a grand finale.
Siegfried is the third in the tetralogy of music dramas that make up Der Ring des Nibelungen . It charts the progress of the young hero as he unshackles himself from the dwarf Mime, reforges his father's sword to kill the dragon Fafner, and thus takes possession of the Ring which he ultimately gives to Brunnhilde to symbolize his devotion. Siegfried contains imperishably beautiful passages such as the Forest Murmurs, the profound psychological landscape of the Prelude to Act III and the great duet between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. This performance from Sofia Opera features an acclaimed all-Bulgarian cast.
After his success with Freischtz , Weber wanted to write a grand romantic opera and in the end the subject of Euryanthe was chosen, a tale inspired by a legend going back to the thirteen century. Euryanthe is music of inspiration and originality such as is rarely found in the history of German opera in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Italianisms that are occasionally glimpsed in Freischtz are eliminated almost completely. Euryanthe is set to music in its entirety, with accompanied recitative passages that are often of great beauty. We may say that in an opera that has many experimental features Weber sought for the first and only time in his life to overcome the traditional dichotomy between spoken and sung parts, between recitative and closed numbers, creating a highly supple musical structure. The present production features a cast of specialists of German opera and the outstanding direction of Pier Luigi Pizzi.
