Royal Opera House: Norma (2016)

Amadeus

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Rigoletto

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. Rigoletto encourages and welcomes the Duke's conquests, pitilessly mocking his victims until he discovers that the Duke has abducted the one person he genuinely loves, his own daughter. As a result, the character of the court jester is transformed into a tragic figure who, in spite of his evident immorality and malice, allows us to sense the devotion he feels for his daughter and his horror at being destroyed by the same despotic world as that which he himself has helped to create.

Lohengrin

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 year, we are proud to release on Blu-ray the celebrated production of Lohengrin which was premiered on 25 July 2018, featuring an illustrious cast including Piotr Beczala and Anja Harteros in their house debuts, as well as the acclaimed return of Waltraud Meier to the Bayreuth Festival. The New York Times praised Piotr Beczala’s Lohengrin as “outstanding”, Anja Harteros [making] her impressive Bayreuth debut” as Elsa, and Ortrud “played with dominant presence by the incomparable Waltraud Meier”.

The Phantom of the Opera

The deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House causes murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he loves a star.

Jenůfa

When a beautiful young woman in rural Moravia becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she learns that love is sometimes only skin-deep. Janáček took Gabriela Preissová's grim tale of infanticide and redemption, and condensed it into a masterful, spine-chilling drama. The tragic plight of the protagonists is presented with unsentimental realism that cannot help but trigger a response of deep compassion. Premiered at the National Theatre in the composer's hometown of Brno 115 years ago, the opera took him nine years to complete and is the first in which his distinctive voice can clearly be heard.

Acis and Galatea (The Royal Ballet / The Royal Opera)

The Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera collaborate in Wayne McGregor's production of Handel and Gay's classic opera, in which the nymph Galatea falls in love with a shepherd named Acis.

Maytime

An aging opera singer looks back on her long life, including her relationships with her vocal teacher and a student.

The Tales of Hoffmann

A melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer.

Bellini: Norma

This new production of Norma, directed by Grammy Award-nominated opera, theatre and film director Kevin Newbury (winner of the Irish Times Theatre Award 2010) and starring Sondra Radvanovsky as a "powerful, elegant" Norma (New York Times) and Gregory Kunde as Pollione, is "something very special. The word 'historic' is used perhaps a little too often but tonight there really is no other adjective to describe the sensational performances offered to us by Sondra Radvanovsky and Gregory Kunde."

Il club dei 27

A 12-year-old boy tries everything to join a music lovers club.

Puccini: La bohème

"La Bohème" is one of Giacomo Puccini's most popular and timeless works and the second-most performed opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera. This production, directed by the legendary Franco Zeffirelli, features José Carreras, Teresa Stratas, Renata Scotto and Richard Stilwell. The opera is replete with extraordinary visual beauty as it presents the tragic story of young bohemians struggling to make it in the world.

Moonstruck

37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.

Benvenuto Cellini

With his affinity for the 16th-century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini's advocacy of artistic and personal freedom, Hector Berlioz went straight for the grand gesture with his first completed opera. Returning to it years after initial production debacles, Berlioz stated that he would 'never again find such verve and Cellinian impetuosity, nor such a variety of ideas.' The plot revolves around Cellini's wooing of Teresa, a match frustrated at every opportunity by his rival, the cowardly Fieramosca. Benvenuto Cellini is a pithy work combining romance, excitement, violence, comedy and spectacle; the perfect stage for Terry Gilliam's stylishly colorful and larger than life directing.

Giacomo Puccini - Il Trittico

Finding the right librettos was not easy, but one month after the end of the First World War, his triptych – the grim tragedy Il tabarro, the lyrical and sensitive Suor Angelica, and the comedy Gianni Schicchi – premiered in New York. Three different eras, three different settings, three different ‘colours’; though for Puccini, it is through the contrasts between them that the unity of the work is revealed. For his second time directing at La Monnaie, Tobias Kratzer preserves the original order of the pieces, while weaving them together to form a narrative whole, like a circle with no end. With a cast of artists from the extended La Monnaie family, Alain Altinoglu is the ideal conductor to meet the daunting challenges posed by this triptych.

Birth

It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, Joseph, and finally moving on. However, on the night of her engagement party, a young boy named Sean turns up, saying he is her dead husband reincarnated. At first she ignores the child, but his knowledge of her former husband's life is uncanny, leading her to believe that he might be telling the truth.

The Metropolitan Opera: Norma

Deep in a forest where druids and warriors seek revenge against the conquering Romans, Norma is scorned by the Roman proconsul Pollione, with whom she has two children. Her kindness turns to fury when she discovers that Pollione has taken Adalgisa, a novice priestess, as his new lover. When Pollione loses his high rank in the army and is offered as a sacrifice, Norma promises him freedom under one condition.

The Metropolitan Opera: The Exterminating Angel

After the acclaimed Met premiere of Thomas Adès's "The Tempest" in 2012, the composer returned with another masterpiece, this time inspired by filmmaker Luis Buñuel's seminal surrealist classic "El Ángel Exterminador", during the 2017–18 season. As the opera opens, a group of elegant socialites gather for a lavish dinner party, but when it is time to leave for the night, no one is able to escape. Soon, their behavior becomes increasingly erratic and savage. The large ensemble cast tackles both the vocal and dramatic demands of Adès's opera with one riveting performance after another. Tom Cairns, who also penned the work's libretto, directs an engrossing and inventive production, using a towering wooden archway to trap the characters onstage. And Adès himself takes the podium to conduct the frenzied score, which features a host of unconventional instruments, including the eerie electronic ondes Martenot.

The Metropolitan Opera: Tosca

Sir David McVicar’s bold new staging of Tosca, Puccini’s operatic thriller of Napoleonic Rome, thrilled Met audiences when it rang in the New Year in 2018. Only weeks later, the production was seen by opera lovers worldwide as part of the Met’s Live in HD series of cinema presentations. In this performance, Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva is the passionate title diva, opposite charismatic tenor Vittorio Grigolo as her lover, the idealistic painter Mario Cavaradossi. Baritone Željko Lučić is the menacing Baron Scarpia, the evil chief of police who employs brutal tactics to ensnare both criminals and sexual conquests. On the podium, Emmanuel Villaume conducts the electrifying score, which features some of Puccini’s most memorable melodies.

Cosi Fan Tutte

An excellent performance of this delightful opera. The principals are superb, especially the sisters. Bruscantini as Don Alfonso is past his prime, but he knows and understands the role inside out, so one does not even notice his vocal limitations. Araiza is in top form as Ferrando, and Morris makes virile Guglielmo. The only disappointment is Battle as Despina. Unlike her partners, she does not have feel for the Mozart ensemble, and her vocal mannerisms are totally unbecoming. How the producers allowed that to happen is a mystery. Muti's conducting is terrific, much better than on his La Scala video, where he is uninvolved.

Così fan tutte

Mozart's genius in setting to music da Ponte's comic play of love, infidelity and forgiveness marks COSI FAN TUTTE as one of the great works of art from the Age of Enlightenment. Nicholas Hytner's beautiful new production, with its sure touch and theatrical know-how, lives up to its promise to be "shockingly traditional" as Iván Fischer teases artful performances from an outstanding international cast of convincing young lovers.

A Night at the Opera

The Marx Brothers take on high society and the opera world to bring two lovers together. A sly business manager and two wacky friends of two opera singers help them achieve success while humiliating their stuffy and snobbish enemies.

Rigoletto

This tragic story revolves around the licentious Duke of Mantua, his hunch-backed court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda. The opera's original title, La maledizione (The Curse), refers to the curse placed on both the Duke and Rigoletto by a courtier whose daughter had been seduced by the Duke with Rigoletto's encouragement. The curse comes to fruition when Gilda likewise falls in love with the Duke and eventually sacrifices her life to save him from the assassins hired by her father.

Carmen

A film version of the famous Bizet opera, where a soldier (Don Jose) falls in love with a beautiful factory worker (Carmen), but she does not reciprocate his feelings.

Madame Butterfly

Cio-Cio-San, a young Japanese geisha, seeks to fulfill her dreams through marriage to an American naval officer. Her faith in their future is shattered by his empty vows and the loss she endures touches something deep within us all.

Wagner: Die Walküre

Richard Wagner called Die Walküre the “first evening” of the Ring of the Nibelung; he called Das Rheingold the prologue or Vorabend. Musically and dramatically, we are introduced to a radically new and different world when the opening bars of Die Walküre resound. A fully developed orchestral palette of Leitmotivs paints a wild storm scene, and the curtain rises on a modest dwelling: a fully human scene that has nothing to do with the gods, dwarves and nymphs of Das Rheingold. At the same time, however, the way Die Walküre portrays radical beginnings reveals some telling reminiscences of the unfolding of Das Rheingold. Die Walküre is exciting and deeply feeling drama.

The Art of Singing: Golden Voices of the Century

Imagine a window into the past. Imagine finally connecting singers' bodies to the voices you have always treasured on record, watching footage of performances from another era. All of singers featured here have something in common (with one exception, Sutherland): they sang and performed on stage before the advent of filmed opera. . And it shows, for the first time, a few tantalizing minutes of recently recovered footage from Callas' legendary Lisbon Traviata, featuring Addio dal Passato and Parigi oh cara with Alfredo Kraus. This DVD will leave you asking for more.

Tosca

To open its 2019-2020 season, La Scala in Milan has chosen Tosca, in a new production directed by Davide Livermore. The production is part of the rediscovery of Italian opera led by Riccardo Chailly, the conductor of the production and music director of La Scala. He has chosen the original version of Tosca, as created by Puccini in Rome in January 1900, which included eight "additional musical inserts" that were removed from the work after its second performance in Turin in February 1900 and will now be rediscovered for the first time on December 7 at La Scala.

Sarah Plays a Werewolf

17-year old Sarah, filled with adolescent angst, is an extreme person who in her rehearsals with a theatre group is transformed until she is almost in a trance, and her performances at home or elsewhere verge on excess. A cold, intellectual father, a timid mother, a younger sister and an older brother who has left home complete the picture: a silent time bomb.

Mussorgsky: Khovanshchina

Kent Nagano superbly masters the challenges presented by this score, shapes the dynamics with subtle intensity, and casts the score in a mellow glow. As Marfa, the spurned lover of Ivan Khovansky‘s son Andrei, Doris Soffel unfolds such a rich palette of sonorities, from the pathos of the lower ranges to shaded discant heights, that “one is tempted to speak of a Russian mezzo”. The final chorus, which Mussorgsky did not compose, is played in the orchestrally transparent version of Igor Stravinsky – the third great Russian composer who contributed to making “Khovanshchina“ a timeless, gripping stage work. With his stripped-down sets and historicising costumes, director Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of the new voices of contemporary Russian theatre, builds a bridge to the political present. A lesson in history and music!

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s Don Giovanni was first performed in 1787, and was based on the story of the Spanish lothario, Don Juan. The title character seduces, deceives and murders his way through the opera, doing his utmost to experience life, and all that it has to offer, to the full.

Elektra

Strauss's opera adapted to the screen by Gotz Friedrich.

Traviata – You deserve a better future

The audience is invited into Violetta’s privacy to have a close look at the fire to which she abandons herself among the guests of this musical and phantasmagorical celebration that blends theatre and opera, voices that speak and sing, and where the distinction between the instrumentalists and the singers becomes blurred, where Charles Baudelaire is seated next to Christophe Tarkos, and where the phantoms of this Paris in full industrial boom whose future we are living at present, sing and die.

Semele

Opera superstar Cecilia Bartoli offers her first operatic release on DVD in 12 years, and also her first opera in English. Bartoli stars as Semele (a role usually taken by a soprano) in Handel s late opera, which features such well-known arias as Endless pleasure, endless love, Myself I shall adore, and Oh sleep, why dost though leave me? Robert Carsen s stylish modern dress production hints at parallels with the problematic relationship between the late Princess Diana and the British Royal Family. Recorded live at the Zurich Opera House in January, 2007.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Between two Thanksgivings, Hannah's husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly.

Aida - Arena di Verona

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. Chinese soprano Hui He has won international acclaim for her portrayal of the eponymous slave girl whose forbidden love for the war hero Radamés (Marco Berti, the experienced Verdi tenor) brings death to them both.

Carmen in 3D

Passion, jealousy and betrayal take center stage at Londons Royal Opera House in a spectacular production of the worlds most popular opera. Bizets Carmen is packed with some of the best-loved and memorable music in all of opera. In this characteristically vivid and vibrant stage production by Francesca Zambello, beautifully filmed in 3D by Julian Napier, Seville is brought to life with ranks of soldiers, crowds of peasants, gypsies and bullfighters as well as a magnificent horse, a donkey and even some chickens! This spectacular RealD and Royal Opera House production features a supremely talented cast, gripping drama and Bizets energetic and passionate score. It is truly a musical event to remember!