Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.
A staging of Britten's opera filmed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in June 2008.
This recording of the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue by Paul Dukas was staged at the Liceu in Barcelona...
A one-off production of Boris Godunov was staged by Andrei Konchalovsky at the Teatro Regio in Torin...
A superb adaptation of Purcell's the Indian Queen, staged and directed by Peter Sellars and performe...
German composer Richard Wagner wrote Parsifal, which is a three-act opera that tells the story of th...
Scenes from Ruggero Leoncavallo's opera with Canio, the clown, introducing actors who are seen in pa...
Kazushi Ono and Laurent Pelly offer audiences an inspired and poetic interpretation of Ravel's class...
Explores the Opera music genre in the world of cinema.
The Zurich Opera gathered a superb cast for this production: Italian soprano Eva Mei sings the Count...
Recorded at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1995, this acclaimed presentation of composer Gioachi...
In Benjamin Britten's operatic adaptation of Henry James' masterwork, a naive governess (Helen Field...
"La Bohème" is one of Giacomo Puccini's most popular and timeless works and the second-most performe...
Simultaneously filmed English language version of a period operetta, in which a Polish noblewoman is...
John Adams’s mesmerizing score, in the powerful production of Penny Woolcock, tells the story of one...
At Salzburg Festival, Cecilia Bartoli shines as Ariodante with her dazzling coloratura in a highly a...
Margaret Williams directs this 2001 production of adaptation of Benjamin Britten's television opera ...
Music & Musicals, Opera & Operetta, Classical Music - Witness the Zurich Opera's stunning pr...
Live performance from the Schwetzinger Festspiele, 1987. At the age of 21, Italian composer Giacchin...