Category Archives: DVD review

Subjective picks on DVD and Blu-ray

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I’ve reviewed over 600 Blu-ray and DVD recordings on this blog. So I thought I’d have a crack at picking some favourites.  There’s a problem, of course, in comparing recordings made over the course more than 80 years.  There is just no way that “made for TV” recordings pre 2000 can stand up against modern HD productions when it comes to sound and, especially, picture quality so I’ve tried to invent some categories to allow mention of some of the best of them.  It’s going to take a while to sort through all the categories so let’s start with a highly personal set of choices for best overall recording.  Some of them even surprised me.

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Ariadne goes to war

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Katherina Thoma not unreasonably chooses to set her 2013 Glyndebourne production of Ariadne auf Naxos in a country house in the south of England (though I suppose equating the Christies with a rather boorish Viennese bourgeois might be thought a touch unkind).  She also chooses to set it in 1940 which sets us up for an almost Marxian dialectic not just between high art and low art but between art and life; especially where life and death are concerned.

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The Met’s Maria Stuarda on DVD

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Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda featured in the MetHD series in January 2013 and has now been released on DVD.  My review of the cinema broadcast is here.  It’s always a bit different watching the DVD rather than the cinema version but in this case I think my somewhat different reaction has a lot to do with having recently seen various versions of the other Schiller/Donizetti Tudor queen operas, especially Stephen Lawless’ Roberto Devereux at the COC.

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Katerina Izmailova

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Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has become a modern classic but only after it was the cause, or at least purported cause, of his disgrace under Stalin in which the work was criticised both for the subject matter and the “bourgeios formalism” of the music.  A revised version of the work was made into a film under the title Katerina Izmailova in 1966 as part of Shostakovich’s formal rehabilitation in the Soviet Union.

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The Harnoncourt show

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Unusually, the Theater and der Wien’s 2011 production of Handel’s Rodelinda features a father and son team.  Philippe Harnoncourt directs and Nikolaus conducts.  It’s an interesting production with great acting, very decent singing and the always excellent Concentus Musicus Wien in the pit. 1.wardrobe Continue reading →

All star Carmélites

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The 2013 recording of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites from the Théâtre des Champs Elysées has a cast that reads like a roll call of famous French singers; Petitbon, Piau, Gens and Koch are all there.  Throw in Rosalind Plowright and Topi Lehtipuu and one gets some idea of the star power on display.

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Intermezzo

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It has been said that the best music in Richard Strauss’ Intermezzo is in the orchestral interludes that link the various scenes.  It’s probably true and certainly the singers don’t get much interesting to sing with the best music given to the orchestra even during the scenes.  That said, all of the music is vastly better than the truly cringe-worthy libretto, also by Strauss.  It’s in prose, much of it is spoken and there are odd interjections of more vernacular German for the servants, rather in the manner of the random cockney in ancient Ealing films.  The plot is based on an, aaparently real life, episode in the married life of the Strausses, here thinly disguised as the Storches, in which Frau Storch gets the wrong end of the stick about suspected infidelity by her husband and threatens divorce.  If Frau Strauss ever saw the piece, which is apparently unlikely, she might reasonably have seen the portrayal of herself by her husband as much sounder grounds for dumping him.  Christine Storch is the sort of woman one wants to tie up in a sack and drown!

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Puzzling Così

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The 2013 production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte from Madrid’s Teatro Real is one of German film director Michael Haneke’s comparatively rare forays into opera.  Naturally I was expecting a highly conceptual interpretation but, although his vision is far from conventional, Konzept found I not.  What I saw was a collection of ideas that didn’t quite cohere for me.  Costume and sets are a mix of 18th century modern.  We are in Don Alfonso’s inconsistently modernised mansion.  There are enormous 18th century paintings and chandeliers but also leatherette banquettes and the Giant Fridge of Booze.  The boys and girls wear contemporary party attire, including a rather fetching red dress for Fiordiligi, but Don Alfonso is in full 18th century gard and Despina seems to be dressed as Pierrot.  Perhaps it’s some sort of party where some of the guests have decided to do the costume thing and some haven’t?  When the boys go off to the army they do so in some sort of distant past opera version of military uniform; wigs and swords.

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Ravel double bill

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In 2012 Glyndebourne staged an interesting and contrasting double bill of Ravel one-acters in productions by Laurent Pelly.  The first was L’heure espagnole.  It’s a sort of Feydeau farce set to music.  The plot is classic bedroom farce with the twist that most of the doors the lovers come in or out of belong to clocks.  Concepción is the bored wife of a nerdy clockmaker.  She’s not overly impressed by her two lovers; a prolix poet and a smug banker, who show up while hubby is out doing the municipal clocks.  She’s much more taken by the slightly simple but very muscular muleteer who spends most of his time lugging lover infested clocks up and down stairs for her.  Pelly wisely takes the piece at face value and brings off a mad cap forty five minutes timed to the split second.

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High contrast Traviata

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The starting point for Peter Mussbach’s 2003 production of La Traviata for the Aix-en-Provence festival is his knowledge, as one trained as a medical doctor, of the effects of TB on a person’s appearance.  He argues that the disease produces a strange kind of beauty with the skin translucent and pale.  So, here Mireille Delunsch, as Violetta, wears a white dress, a platinum wig and very pale powder throughout while everyone else is dressed in black.  Couple this with a high contrast and highly dramatic lighting plot and very sparse sets and you have the essence of the “look”.  The blocking and Personenregie reinforces this with Violetta often appearing to be an ethereal, not quite solid, presence surrounded by a rather coarse material world.

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