Death in Venice was Britten's final opera--an extraordinarily atmospheric and haunting adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella, evoking the grandeur and shabbiness of a Venice in the grip of disease. He eloquently and evocatively describes the moral and physical degeneration of Aschenbach, the writer whose obsessive pursuit of beauty in the form of a boy leads him into humiliation and death. Robert Tear takes the demanding role of Aschenbach opposite Alan Opie, who sings the various baritone parts. To portray the beauty and fascination of the Polish family and Tadzio, Britten made prominent the use of dance, by turning these characters into dancers, choreographed in this production by Martha Clarke. This new production for Glydebourne is directed by Stephen Lawless and conducted by Graeme Jenkins.
Based on real events and drawing on Georg Büchner's revolutionary play, Alban Berg's Wozzeck turns a grimly tragic narrative of violence and murder into one of the most powerful and original operas of the 20th century.
Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate.
The soldier Wozzeck (Christian Gerhaher) flits through a world that he is unable to decipher. The doctor torments him with absurd medical experiments; the captain humiliates and ridicules him.
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.
Mario Martone signs direction and scenes of this new film-work of Verdi's masterpiece. On the podium of the Orchestra of the Teatro dell'opera in Rome its musical director, maestro Daniele Gatti.
After a young Triad member takes an upper-class girl hostage during his escape from a jewelry heist, the two find themselves falling in love, in spite of the repercussions caused by their forbidden relationship.
On a West German Autobahn, Robert plummets from a bridge and is hospitalized. As he recovers, he flashes back to a Bulgarian holiday where he met Jutta and her uncle Lothar, who’d ordered a West German passport to smuggle her out of the DDR.
The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway.
Lucia (Natassja Kinski) is a volatile, exciteable young woman. She forms a romance with Carlo (Stefano Dionisi), who is somewhat callow and is very skittish.
Chucky is reconstructed by a toy factory to dispel the negative publicity surrounding the doll, and tracks young Andy Barclay to a foster home where the chase begins again.
The boisterous good humor of Jurmala, the nickel-mine owner, is, if anything, only barely dented by the raging battles in Finland before, during and after World War Two.
Young people living in Poland in the late 1960s had to face difficult times and make tough choices. Some of them were forced to leave their country for having Jewish origin.
Comments
Have you watched Death in Venice yet? What did you think about it?
