Claude D'Anna's film of Verdi's Macbeth is a gloomy affair, stressing the descent into madness of the principal villains. It's acted by the singers of the Decca recording of the opera (with two substitutions of actors standing in for singers) and the lip-synching is generally unobtrusive. The musical performance is superb, conducted by Riccardo Chailly with admirable fire, and sung by some of the leading lights of the opera stages of the 1980s. Shirley Verrett virtually owned the role of Lady Macbeth at the time, and she delivers a terrific performance, the voice equal to the role's wide register leaps and it's suffused with emotion, whether urging her husband on to murder or maddened by guilt in the Sleepwalking Scene. Leo Nucci's resonant Macbeth may lack the ultimate in vocal color and steadiness (his last notes of the great aria Pietà, rispetto, amore are wobbly) but he compensates with intensity in both singing and acting.
Classics on a Summer's Evening is an outdoor concert for an enormous audience which was staged in an...
Franco Zeffirelli's magnificient staging of Puccini's final opera - a fairy tale set in a mythical C...
Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the...
The deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House causes murder and mayhem in an attempt to make...
The Queen of the Night enlists a handsome prince named Tamino to rescue her beautiful kidnapped daug...
Lovely but lethal, the evil Princess Turandot comes to life through the performance of Luana De Vol ...
A version of Benjamin Britten's opera based on the Melville story. Will the virtuous young sailor Bi...
Based on a revolutionary play supposedly written by the Eternal President of the Democratic People's...
The operatic version of the famous story about a governess who fears her two charges are possessed.
Take a perfect cast, a great conductor and a groundbreaking staging in-out makes a 'Tristan' for ete...
Arabella, Op. 79, is a lyric comedy or opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto b...
In Rigoletto, the deformed figure of the hunchbacked jester at the Mantuan court acts as a foil to h...
Officers Ferrando and Guglielmo are certain that their lovers Dorabella and Fiordiligi are faithful ...
Kristine Opolais is the young woman whose conflicting desires for love and luxury lead to her tragic...
Passion, jealousy and betrayal take center stage at Londons Royal Opera House in a spectacular produ...
This live version of Puccini s superbly dramatic opera was recorded in Rome in the exact locations a...
Trapped in an abusive marriage, a wealthy German prince desperately seeks a way out. But what appear...