Giuseppe Verdi's LaTraviata is one of the world's most famous operas. The opera isbased on aplay which was an adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel entitled Ladame auxCamelias. It was first produced as an opera in a Venice venue in March1853 andcontinues to be a popular opera production to this day. The entireoperaproduction is done with Italian libretto singing.

This production of Verdi's LaTraviata stars Venera Gimadieva as ViolettaValéry, Michael Fabiano as Alfredo, and Tassis Christoyannis  as Alfredo's father Giorgio Germont. Violettais a courtesan at the beginning. There is an elaborate party with ma...Read the entire review

Tchaikovsky's SwanLake is presented as a new ballet interpretation of the 1895version. Thefamous ballet is given a modern update while recalling Russianstylisticelements through the design work created by Yolanda Sonnabend. NatalieOsipovaand Matthew Golding star in the lead roles. This production isperformed at theRoyal Opera House.

Swan Lake continues to be heralded as one of the definitiveballet classics. It's not difficult to imagine why it has held up sowell sinceits debut. The classical music created by composer Tchaikovsky isexquisite andis a musical journey to behold. The sweeping beauty of these musicalcompositions is integral to the continued le...Read the entire review

The Product:
If you were a child in the '60s and '70s, art was as much a part of your schooling as science. You took life drawing as well as English, music along with mathematics. Somewhere, someone thought that history had to be augmented with an appreciation for all things aesthetic. Today, budget cuts and PC-protests have removed most of these ancillary educational devices, rendering the post-modern experience a combination of memorization and rote test regurgitation. We bring this up because for many born after the end of disco, something like Peter and the Wolf will be nothing more than a shoulder shrug. The 'songs' will sound familiar, but for the most part, few will have seen the actual ballet or heard the score in pure symphonic bliss. We straggling boomers can remember when it was a ritual, a puppet show or local dance company presentation put on so that the elementary school...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM:

My glancing familiarity with modernist/minimalist composer Steve Reich comes from the same place as my no-less-glancing familiarity with a host of other classical and neoclassical composers, from Bach to Chopin to Arvo Pärt: the movies (with specific respective thanks to Hannah and her Sisters, Autumn Sonata, and Heaven). I recognize Reich's name because, as one of the best-known modern composers, it's mentioned virtually any time I read anything about non-pop contemporary music, but I've only ever heard his work when...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM:

Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.

There are many cinematic points of reference that could be brought to bear on Billy Budd, the 1948 opera (adapted from Herman Melville's novella) by composer Benjamin Britten, novelist/librettist E.M. Forster, and frequent Britten collaborator Eric Crozier. Neither Britten nor Forster have been strangers to movieland; Britten, one of the 20th century's most well-regarded composers, has had his music used in films as diverse as Talk to Her and Lov...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Not your father's opera (nor mine)

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Modern musicals
Likes: Good singers, interesting set design
Dislikes: Opera (apparently)
Hates: The Anna Nicole Smith Era

The Movie
A short while ago I had posted on Facebook that, though the latest generation has only known a world seemingly on the edge of collapse at every minute, they also have no idea who Anna Nicole Smith is, and for that they are fortunate. Even in today's reality TV-infused culture, to watch an episode of her series is to know true disgust, as even though she was a fully compliant, willing participant in a very public spiral toward death, it is, especially in hindsight, a disturb...Read the entire review

The Product:
Why is Hamlet often considered the greatest play in all of theater? Why hasn't some well-known or obscure Greek comedy or modern Broadway work surpassed its Sgt. Pepper's like staying power? Part of the reason is the man who wrote it. William Shakespeare is such an enigma, a writer of considerable conjecture and speculation that, even today, many question his authorship and abilities. Burying his complicated storylines in reams of rhyme and metered measures, he's as elusive as his works are engaging. It could also be the complex psychological issues at play, from anger and revenge to madness both feigned and frighteningly real. There is ennui and melancholy, confusion and thoughts of suicide sprinkled throughout - pretty deep for something written around 1600. Perhaps the main reason for its longevity and classicism comes from the ease of adaptability. From period ...Read the entire review

The Performance:

Images in this review from OpusArte.com

The 2004 San Francisco Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker - and Opus Arte's excellent Blu-ray edition - is an ideal introduction for those new and perhaps a bit leery of the classical dance form, and it's especially apropos at this time of year. I must confess that, up to now, my exposure to ballet had been limited to short snippets on television while channel surfing and ballet sequences in movies like The Red Shoes and Invitation to the Dance. But I was already familiar with Tchaikovsky's wonderful music (like many, after seeing Disney's Fantasia as a child), and there was another incentive in snapping this up from our unloved screener pile: it's a Blu-ray I hope to share with my two-year-old once she's old enough to enjoy it.

In just about every way, this Nutcracker is eminently accessible and delightful, at times quite magical. The high-definition im...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

AUTHOR'S DISCLAIMER: I am not someone who can be considered an opera fan. I'm not saying I hate opera, merely, I have never been able to find any time to see an opera live. My experience with opera mainly consists of having heard a number of recordings and viewed a few performances on home video or public television. In this review, please don't expect detailed analysis of the individual performers. All I offer is an outsider's view on one particular production. Thank you.

"Don Giovanni" is Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte's operatic telling of the Don Juan legend. This particular stage production, directed by Francesca Zambello, was performed at the Royal Opera House in London, in late 2008. The entire production runs approximately three hours, with the two acts split evenly across two discs.

The first thing that shocked me about this opera, was the immedi...Read the entire review

The Movie:
If patience is a virtue, I must be about the most virtuous opera Blu-ray reviewer out there. After suffering the slings and arrows of some pretty rotten rotten product over the past several months (many of them from either Opus Arte or Art Haus Musik), I'm happy to report that keeping my head from exploding has evidently finally paid off, because this wonderful new BD of Mozart's Don Giovanni is practically perfect in every way. For once we don't have a director slathering his (actually in this case, her) "vision" over the proceedings like melted Crisco (and usually about as appetizing), and instead are given a "straight," though compelling and visually and aurally satisfying, reading of this piece that offers only one "cheat"--a very brief comic coda "sight gag" that some purists will take exception to, but which actually caps the night off swimmingly and at the ve...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Adolphe Adam was a middling successful 19th century French composer who is best remembered by the public at large today, if indeed he is remembered at all, for his beautiful Christmas carol "O Holy Night." That simple little piece is Adam's music in microcosm--a carefully, clearly constructed melody with flowing harmonies and a classic symmetry that gives it an immediacy that most listeners understand on an instinctual level. The fact is, Adam was better known in his own day for his operas and ballets, none more so than Giselle, which receives an elegant if somewhat uninspired performance in this new Blu-ray.

This is not the most entrancing of ballets, and in fact one might generalize outward from its somewhat dimwitted heroine (who kept reminding me of the similarly "challenged" damsel in Light in the Piazza, for better or worse) to the work as a whole. Adam is ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
I know some of you regular readers may find this incredibly hard to believe, but I was something of a smartass in my high school and college days. I especially liked prodding those members of the intelligentsia who deigned themselves a cut above us mere relatively above average folk. For some reason, musical prodigies irked me more than, say, literary types, and I used to try giving them a little (pretty easy, I thought) brainbuster by asking them, "What very specific thing do Mendelssohn and Wagner have in common?" I thought the answer would be obvious to anyone who really thought about it--Wagner's "Bridal Chorus" (AKA "Here Comes the Bride") from Lohengrin is the typical Wedding March that brides enter their ceremony to, and Mendelssohn's similarly themed work from A Midsummer Night's Dream is the traditional wedding recessional (think The Newlywed Gam...Read the entire review

The Movie:
I don't know if it's sad or funny that a lot of Baby Boomers like myself were first exposed to Pagliacci through that old commercial where the clown sang, "Chips like my pizza, like my beautiful pizza." If you're too young to remember that one, count yourself lucky that one of the most famous standalone arias in all operatic repertoire, Canio's tormented "Vesti la Giubba" wasn't forever imprinted in your mind as a cheap Doritos ad. Since the late 19th century, both Pagliacci and the thematically related Cavelleria Rusticana, both of them together running just a little over two hours, have been paired in performance, colloquially known as "Cav and Pag." That pairing is followed in this new BD, which also links the two in quick bridging moment at the end of Cavelleria, which literally spills over into the first crowd scene of Pagliacci. (As in...Read the entire review

The Movie:
For those of you (and you know who you are) who think that Western culture is the be-all end-all of things cultural and artistic, it may be a bit of comeuppance to realize that the Persian mystic Zoroaster has provided us westerners with several pieces of unparalleled art, both literary and musical. There is of course Nietzsche's famous "Also Sprach Zarathustra," which Richard Strauss then transmogrified into one of the most famously gargantuan tone-poems of the late 19th century. But there's also the lesser known opera Zoroastre, by Jean-Philippe Rameau, which receives a consistently engaging and historically "accurate" (in terms of stagecraft) production here by Sweden's Drottingholm Theatre Orchestra and Chorus.

Zoroastrianism is, in essence (like most religions), a meditation on the eternal battle of good versus evil, personified by the God of Light, Ahura Mazda, and...Read the entire review

The Movie:
George Balanchine was a titan of 20th century ballet, a master who was able to incorporate modern trends while simultaneously managing not to completely eschew classical tradition. These two seemingly irreconcilable artistic methods are on excellent display in one of Balanchine's most celebrated, if least performed, ballets, Jewels, a triptych first performed in the late 1960s by Balanchine's own New York City troupe, and here resurrected by the ballet and orchestra of the Paris Opera.

Jewels is an interesting triumvirate of styles and attitudes that is broken into three "movements," Emeralds, Rubies and Diamonds. Emeralds, set to the soothing and melodic post-Impressionism of Gabriel Faure, seeks to espouse the classical French dancing style. Rubies, the most forward-thinking piece in this set, is a wonderfully quirkly examination of American styles, including s...Read the entire review

Swan Lake is among the most enduring and instantly recognizable ballets to have ever been produced, and in much the same way as Shakespeare has continually been reinterpreted and reimagined over the centuries, so too has this ballet been resculpted and reshaped time and again. This HD DVD from Opus Arte captures a performance by the Paris Opera Ballet, choreographed by Rudolf Nureyev some fifty years after he himself first danced in the role of Prince Siegfried.

Plagued by the inescapable pressure to be wed, Prince Siegfried (José Martinez) dreams of a beautiful woman who's carried off into the night by a monstrous creature. This image continues to linger in his mind even as he prepares for his birthday celebration and goes for a stroll along the shores of a nearby lake. It's there that Siegfried encounters Odette (Agnès Letestu), the entrancingly beautiful creature f...Read the entire review

The Opera:
Die Fledermaus (The Bat in English) is one of the twenty most often performed operas in the United States, and I sincerely hope most of them are better than the production presented on HD DVD by Opus Arte. Based on a German farce and a French vaudeville play, Die Fledermaus is a broad comedy with all kinds of mistaken identities and sexual innuendos. By itself, the story isn't much to shout about. But the piece has become a mainstay due to the inspired compositions by Johan Strauss II.

Strauss was famous in Vienna for having revolutionized the waltz. Dubbed "The Waltz King," he had far more success with individual compositions (such as the world famous "Blue Danube") than he ever did with opera or operettas. Die Fledermaus was easily the most popular of all of his longer works, and contained many memorable tunes. Its enduring popularity even tod...Read the entire review