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.
This filmed version of Strauss' shocker features Teresa Stratas as opera's most depraved teenager, and she's as perfect a Salome as one would ever hope to see or hear.
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.
Popular movie trailers from 2013
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 2013:
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.
When a lonely man finds out the love of his life has a conjoined twin, who happens to be a serial killer, he must take drastic measures to keep his love life intact while keeping himself out of big trouble.
May 6, 2012. Cable news reporter Laetitia is covering the French presidential elections, while Vincent, her ex-husband, demands to see their two young daughters.
Life for former United Nations investigator Gerry Lane and his family seems content. Suddenly, the world is plagued by a mysterious infection turning whole human populations into rampaging mindless zombies.
A documentary about a trans-racial adoptee who finds her birth mother, and meets the rest of a family who didn't know she existed, including her birth father.
A woman and young daughter escape her abusive husband by faking their deaths. Eight years later she is happily living in the upscale Palm Springs with her now-17-year-old daughter.
Hamdan is a former Palestinian leader who spent 15 years locked up in the old Israeli prisons. In 1973, while living in Syria, he was given a mission to smuggle explosives across the border and train a person he trusted.
Comments
Have you watched Britten: Gloriana yet? What did you think about it?
