Die Jahreszeiten/The Seasons

Haydn Die Jahreszeiten/The Seasons oratorio. Conducted 2013 by Nicolaus Harnoncourt at the Salzburg Festival with the Wiener Philharmoniker and the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor (Vienna Philharmonic and the Concert Group of the Vienna State Opera Chorus with Concert Master Ernst Raffelsberger). Soloists are Dorothea Röschmann (soprano), Michael Schade (tenor), and Florian Boesch (bass). Also features the documentary Nikolaus Harnoncourt rehearsing Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons by Eric Schulz. Directed for TV by Michael Bayer. Sung in German. Released 2014, disc has 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. Grade: NA

Writing in the Awards 2014 Gramophone at page 94, Richard Wigmore lays praise on this recording with that famous trowel (from As You Like It). The video, he says, is "is intelligent and unfussy, always focusing on what you want to see . . . buy this, then, not only for a performance that does rich justice to Haydn's bucolic masterpiece but also for Harnoncourt's ever-stimulating thoughts, and some notably revealing and entertaining rehearsal footage."

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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.