In celebration of Verdi's 200th birthday in 2013, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence produced the composer's colorful masterpiece Rigoletto for the first time in its history. Verdi expert Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a production that marked the return of the Canadian stage director Robert Carsen to the festival following a 17 year hiatus. Carsen sets his interpretation of this classic opera in the cutthroat world of the circus. Based on Victor Hugo's play Le roi s’amuse, Verdi's opera in three acts Rigoletto premiered in 1851. Similar to the play that inspired it, the opera faced censorship because of its controversial subject of libertinism at court. The opera’s tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunchbacked court jester Rigoletto, and the jester’s beautiful daughter, Gilda.
For his first opera production, Dario Fo, the theatre director known for his brilliant wit, chose to stage Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia sung in Italian for the Netherlands Opera.
Recorded in 1992 at the Ludwigsburger Schlosstheater, this release from Art Haus Musik features a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's two-act opera Die Zauberflote.
The definitive version of this rare opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The costume and set design is truly visionary and other worldly and gives a convincing insight into what staged operas must have looked like during the Baroque and Rococo period.
I Vespri Siciliani must me Verdi's most underrated masterpiece. Most people are put off by the fact that it has 5 acts, therefore they conclude that it must be incredibly long.
Emmanuelle Haïm has established herself as one of the world’s leading performers, conductors and interpreters of Baroque repertoire, not only with Le Concert d’Astrée, the ensemble she founded in 2000, but with several of the world’s greatest orchestras.
Live from Munich June 2014. Guillaume Tell , in a new production by 30-year-old Wunderkind stage director Antú Romero Nunes, opens this year’s Munich Opera Festival with an orgy of fabulous singing.
Popular movie trailers from 2014
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 2014:
Istanbul cirminal underworld; a place of merciless families and swaggering hitmen afraid of no one. Kadir Korkut, nicknamed the "Demon" is the most fearsome of their kind.
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé.
Psychic, occult, grotesque, violence, madness, psychotic... The introduction to the popular Japanese horror series featuring horrifying, shocking and taboo images of videos that cameras caught! Collection of popular 3 episodes from volume 1 to volume 3.
An orphaned boy raised by underground creatures called Boxtrolls comes up from the sewers and out of his box to save his family and the town from the evil exterminator, Archibald Snatcher.
The ultimate X-Men ensemble fights a war for the survival of the species across two time periods as they join forces with their younger selves in an epic battle that must change the past – to save our future.
Comments
Have you watched Rigoletto - Festival d'Aix-en-Provence yet? What did you think about it?
