This superb 2006 production of the Los Angeles Opera's La Traviata stars Renée Fleming, who joins the ranks of the elite handful of sopranos whose vocal and acting talents make their portrayals memorable. Her Violetta Valéry is a vulnerable figure torn between self-indulgence and love, sacrificing personal happiness to become a victim of the social mores of mid-19th-century bourgeois France. Fleming's acting captures the complexity of the character and her vocalism is flawless. She negotiates the wild coloratura of Act One with aplomb, and is stunning in the lyric passages that pervade the opera, and touching in her scenes with her lover, Alfredo, and his father. Her singing is free of the mannerisms that have sometimes crept into her work and at the same time she brings countless personal touches to the role, phrasing and verbal emphases that shed fresh light on the character.

The grand scale and magnificent acoustics of the Roman arena in Verona are ideally suited to the pag...

In a small Japanese town, Ko-Ko is appointed to the unenviable position of executioner. Knowing he m...

The production was the Vienna State Opera debut for the young Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan – the ...

Emmanuelle Haïm has established herself as one of the world’s leading performers, conductors and int...

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the...

This set has Edita Gruberova singing in top form, all her scooping cast aside, which one finds in ab...

This May 2010 production of Massenet's 1910 opera "Don Quichotte" marked the opera's centenary and a...
The writer Dario Fo applies his inventive genius to Rossini's comic opera in its premiere DVD releas...

Götterdämmerung, the final instalment of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, is a story of human passions...

A musical drama based on Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto.

The life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singe...

Simon Rattle conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker in Stepháne Braunschweig's production of Richard W...

Viva Vivaldi! is a concert by the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli interspersing arias from the...

The first-ever audio-visual recording of this opera – directed by Christof Loy, conducted by Marc Al...

Starring Jonas Kaufmann as Bacchus and featuring Emily Magee with Daniel Harding conducting the Vien...

17-year old Sarah, filled with adolescent angst, is an extreme person who in her rehearsals with a t...

Handel's 1724 opera Tamerlano followed the success of his previous year's Giulio Cesare with another...

Premiered in 1787, “Don Giovanni” exposes the timeless theme of a man hovering between vitality and ...

John Eliot Gardiner conducts Gluck’s 1776 French version of “Alceste” at the Théâtre du Châtelet in ...