Bruckner Symphony No. 5

Bruckner Symphony No. 5 recorded by Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden. Directed for TV by Henning Kasten. Released 2014, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

Writing in the January 2015 Gramophone (page 29), Rob Cowan has only praise for this stating, "Neither austere in the manner of Wand nor viscerally supercharged along Fürtwanglerian lines, Christian Thielemann and his Dresden orchestra offer honest reportage plain and simple, a Fifth to savour repeatedly . . . the camerawork, like the musical performance, eschews irritating eccentricity."

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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.