Adriano in Siria — HDVDARTS

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi Adriano in Siria opera. Directed 2010 by Ignacio García at the Teatro G. B. Pergolesi in Jesi, Italy. Stars Marina Comparato (Adriano), Lucia Cirillo (Emirena), Annamaria dell’Oste (Farnaspe), Nicole Heaston (Sabina), Stefano Ferrari (Osroa), Francesca Lombardi (Aquilio Tribuno) , Monica Bacelli (Livietta), and Carlo Lepore (Tracollo). Ottavio Dantone conducts the Accademia Bizantina. Set design by Zulima Memba del Olmo; costume design by Patricia Toffolutti; lighting design by Ignacio Garcia and Fabrizio Gobbi. Directed for TV by Tiziano Mancini; produced for Blu-ray by James Whitbourn. Sung in Italian. Released 2011, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

David Vickers wrote a glowing review of this rarity in the February 2012 Gramophone at page 87. According to Vickers this work was "lost" from about 1735 to 1985 (250 years!). As usual for the Gramophone, reviewers, you can't tell if he saw the DVD or the Blu-ray version.

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Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, fine-art documentaries, and paintings. In the journal below are independent (and hard-to-find critical) reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.

Feb 25. We have just completed one of our most ambitious reviews: Einstein on the Beach opera, the surreal 4 and 1/2 hour cult legend. Kudos, encomiums, and accolades to Opus Arte for giving us this authoritative and weirdly fascinating recording, which we grade A+. Absorbing and learning Einstein is uniquely challenging. We try to help out by providing aids not included in the keepcase materials: an accurate libretto and a list of segments in the opera with correct Opus Arte time stamps. Good luck!

We have some other good grades with an A for the recent Met The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) and a B- for an earlier The Pearl Fishers from Naples. Also, we recently gave an A- for the new Don Quixote from the Vienna State Ballet.