Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana was written in 1953 for celebrations around the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, to whom the opera is dedicated. It had its first performance at the Royal Opera House on 8 June 1953, in the presence of The Queen then just 6 days into her reign. The centenary in 2013 of Britten’s birth prompted this new Royal Opera production, in which director Richard Jones uses the setting of a celebratory pageant in 1953 to explore the work’s alternating splendour and intimacy. This theatrical, inventive and colourful staging has at its core the symbolic reflections between the Tudor Elizabethan and the New Elizabethan ages that characterize the opera. The juxtaposition of the modern and the archaic in William Plomer’s libretto is wonderfully amplified in music that artfully fuses the sounds and manners of Tudor England – from lute songs to courtly dances – with Britten’s own distinctive style.
Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In Rigoletto, the deformed figure of the hunchbacked jester at the Mantuan court acts as a foil to his cynical and powerful master, an unscrupulous philanderer contrasted with his cruel and unforgiving fool.
Kristine Opolais is the young woman whose conflicting desires for love and luxury lead to her tragic end, and Roberto Alagna plays the man who falls for her in Puccini’s early hit.
Charles Mackerras teases the romantic beauty from Gounod's score, which has been widely admired since its first performance at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, in 1867.
After Tristan und Isolde (2016), Parsifal (2017) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2018) this is the fourth installment of the exclusive, multiyear partnership between Deutsche Grammophon and the Bayreuth Festival, in which the Yellow Label is the exclusive audiovisual partner of the mythical Wagner festival, releasing each edition's new production on Blu-ray.
Franz Woyzeck, a lowly soldier stationed in a mid-nineteenth century provincial German town, is the father of an illegitimate child by his mistress Marie.
Arabella, Op. 79, is a lyric comedy or opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, their sixth and last operatic collaboration.
Mia, a drug addict, is determined to kick the habit. To that end, she asks her brother, David, his girlfriend, Natalie and their friends Olivia and Eric to accompany her to their family's remote forest cabin to help her through withdrawal.
A bullied student sees visions of a rabbit he was forced to kill as a child, and those visions propel him into a state where his imagination causes him to carry out violent acts.
Using massive piloted robots to combat the alien threat, earth's survivors take the fight to the invading alien force lurking in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
Gob, a product designer who always manages to find something crap to present to his boss and really wants someone who can listen to his problems when he feels down.
A true Canadian iconoclast, acclaimed transgender country/electro-pop artist Rae Spoon revisits the stretches of rural Alberta that once constituted “home” and confronts memories of growing up queer in an abusive, evangelical household.
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Have you watched Britten: Gloriana yet? What did you think about it?
