In 1810, Mustafà, Bey of Algiers and thoroughly fed up with his wife, the docile Elvira, orders the captain of the corsairs to find him one of those feisty Italian women. It turns out to be Isabella, an Italian woman of unparalleled beauty searching for her fiancé Lindoro, whom Mustafà happens to be holding captive in his seraglio. The Bey intends to give Lindoro to his wife Elvira, hoping to get rid of him once and for all. Isabella, accompanied by her annoying suitor Taddeo—whom she passes off as her uncle to save him from the gallows—relies on her powers of seduction.
“L’italiana in Algeri” (The Italian Girl in Algiers) is a two-act dramma giocoso (opera buffa) by Gioachino Rossini, with a libretto by Angelo Anelli. It premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on May 22, 1813. Recorded in the studios of Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) in Milan on July 10, 1957.
With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato) combines the worlds of film and opera at the Verdi Festival in Parma, demonstrating what magic those two can do together with an all new approach to Giuseppe Verdi's Giovanna d'Arco, staged and edited by himself and his wife, Saskia Boddeke.
The grand scale and magnificent acoustics of the Roman arena in Verona are ideally suited to the pageantry of Verdi's Egyptian opera, presented here in a staging that is true to the original 1913 production, framed by obelisks and sphinxes and filled with chorus and dancers.
Semyon Bychkov conducts a cast of young, up-and-coming talent including American soprano Corinne Winters in a new production of Mozart’s opera on the nature of love.
Mozart’s early masterpiece returned to the Met for the first time in more than a decade with Music Director Emeritus James Levine, who led the work’s company premiere in 1982, again on the podium.
By the year 2056, an epidemic of organ failures has devastated the planet. The megacorporation GeneCo provides organ transplants on a payment plan — and those unable to fulfill their plans have their organs repossessed.
Tchaikovsky’s setting of Pushkin’s timeless verse novel is presented on the Met stage in Deborah Warner’s moving production, starring Anna Netrebko as Tatiana and Mariusz Kwiecien and Peter Mattei sharing the title role.
Young forester Sixt is wounded one night. Smuggling in the mountains is the reason. By day, the brothers Benno and Simon Schaidler are respectable citizens - by night, they are smugglers and poachers.
A mad doctor uses patients at his isolated psychiatric institute as subjects in his attempts to create longevity by surgically installing an artificial gland in their skulls.
Culver is a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism to treat his patients. When Carpenter, a test pilot, comes to see him complaining of blackouts that make his job difficult, Culver tries to mesmerise him into killing his wife.
