Donizetti: Lelisir damore

Donizetti - La Favorite

Donizetti's French masterpiece was in the hands of Italian conductor Antonello Allemandi. This maestro, a bel canto specialist, captured the fire and intensity of the passions from the get-go, making the overture a superbly eloquent transition to a musical world based on beautiful lines and colors that elaborate distress and make it compellingly elegant. Allemandi demonstrated a full authority over the stage for the musically complex scenes, and in the arias and duets he demonstrated his confidence in the artistry of distraught singers by establishing ample tempos to support their soaring vocal lines while he concentrated on pulling every possible nuance from the pit players.
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The Passion of Scrooge

Is this a film about Scrooge? About a composer’s life? An opera within an opera? The Passion of Scrooge blurs these lines between performance, documentary, and fiction, into a cinematic concert experience that’s seasoned with magical reality. Composer Jon Deak has adapted Charles Dickens’ timeless tale into a contemporary opera that melts the heart, but doesn’t avoid the darkness in Scrooge that’s still resonant with the material concerns of our time. Using neither period costumes, nor set pieces to reconstruct old England, the film invites you to experience A Christmas Carol with the imaginative possibilities of a radio play. And then, to meet those visions in your head, filmmaker H. Paul Moon‘s floating camera intimately captures musicians performing the score as characters themselves, in this ageless haunted redemption story about “us, every one.”
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Jonas Kaufmann: An Evening with Puccini

In June 2015, superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann walked onto the stage of La Scala in Milan to perform a concert of Puccini arias. The concert made national news in Italy with the audience demanding five encores and a forty minute standing ovation. The film of this legendary performance, Jonas Kaufmann An Evening with Puccini, will be shown nationwide in over 300 movie theaters on February 23, and is available as a DVD and Blu-ray. Directed by Brian Large, the film includes an introduction about Puccini the man, the musician, the superstar narrated by Jonas and featuring rare archive footage. The program features a selection of Puccini s world-famous tenor arias all of which appear on Kaufmann s latest recording, Nessun dorma The Puccini Album.
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Der Fliegende Holländer

This vivid film of Wagner's romatic opera succeeds in conveying what has famously been called "the wind that blows out at you whenever you open the score", including Daland's boat anchoring against the Sandwike cliffs, the red-sailed phantom ship, and the ghost crew rising from the dead. "Scenes that recall classic horror films... Brilliantly successful" (Nürnberger Nachrichten), "Captures the works' essence" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). With a superb cast; conducted by Wagner authority Wolfgang Sawallisch.
Movie Star Rating : 6  Read More

Farinelli

The life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singers of all time.
Movie Star Rating : 6.6  Read More

Le Villi

Le Villi is an opera-ballet in two acts composed by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, based on the short story Les Willis by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.
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