Flórez in Florence

Flórez in Florence recital. Performed 2020 at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Juan Diego Flórez sings opera excerpts. Features Antonio Garès as second tenor. Carlo Rizzi conducts the Orchestra e Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Directed for TV by Tiziano Mancini; video production by Metis; sound recording and editing by MASClassica Audio Recording with Claudio Speranzini, and Antonio Martino. Released 2021, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

The program features excerpts from:

Rossini, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Ermione, and La pietra del paragone
Bellini, Norma
Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor
Offenbach Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Bizet, Carmen
Gounod, Faust
Massenet, Manon
Puccini, Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tuandot
plus guitar encores by Andrea Bixio, Carlos Gardel, Chabuca Granda, and Tomás Méndez.

For a while, we thought this might be vaporware. It’s now October 2021. We can’t find any YouTube video, and some vendors don’t have it. This ought to be a fine show, but it seems Dynamic has not promoted this well.

Buy on Amazon

What's New

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.