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.
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.
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.
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.
A wealthy business man discovers he has a brain tumor and seeks medical help. The business man finds a scientist experimenting with transplanting monkey heads on different monkey bodies.
A young street vendor who is a cockfighting aficionado, attracted by the image of one of them, settles on the ranch of its owner where he falls in love with the foreman's daughter.
The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father.
