Kasper Holten’s Royal Opera House production of Don Giovanni, seen in cinemas, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It’s a visually and dramatically complex production so it’s probably as well that there’s plenty of explanatory material on the disks and in the booklet. Es Devlin’s set is a two storey structure that rotates and serves as a screen for a heavy use of video projections by Luke Halls. These start wth the 2065 names of the women Don Giovanni has seduced and seem to be mostly about what’s going on in Don Giovanni’s head. The sequence during Fin ch’han dal vino calda la testa is particularly spectacular.
Fatal attraction
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Well not strictly baroque. I wanted a category for pre-Mozart rep since so many houses (and audiences) ignore it and there are some very odd ideas about performing it. So we are going to cover ground from the earliest days of opera to the late 18th century here, including staged versions of oratorios, because I rather like them. Here, in rough order of composition, then are my picks; from Monteverdi to Rameau. 
The opera video recording is in some ways a rather recent phenomenon. Before the DVD there really wasn’t a very satisfactory way of distributing a product with a decent sound though there were TV broadcasts and some have been preserved in the catalogue. Most of the extant recordings are “made for TV” and tend to show the limitations of the technology of the time. Interestingly, most pre 1980 recordings are of films made in the studio and lip synched to a pre-recorded track. There are only a handful of recordings of live performances in the opera house plus some pioneering BBC recordings of Britten works where the singers are “live”.
operaramblings 