I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Bellini I Capuleti e i Montecchi opera to a libretto by Felice Romani. Directed 2015 by Christof Loy at Opernhaus Zürich. Stars Joyce DiDonato (Romeo), Olga Kulchynska (Giulietta), Benjamin Bernheim (Tebaldo), Alexei Botnarciuc (Capellio), Roberto Lorenzi (Lorenzo), and Gieorgij Puchalski (Companion). Fabio Luisi conducts the Philharmonia Zürich and Chor der Oper Chorus Zürich (Chorus Master Jürg Hämmerli). Sets and costumes by Christian Schmidt; lighting by Frank Evin; choreography by Thomas Wilhelm. Directed for TV by Michael Beyer; produced by Paul Smaczny. Sung in Italian. Released 2016, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio output. Grade: NA

Director Loy specializes in dark, bare, empty (cheap) sets peopled in black and white (see artwork above) but also laden with wicked psychological twists. This will make for a huge contrast with the extremely colorful I Capuleti e i Montecchi we recently got from the San Francisco opera. Per Neil Fisher writing in the December 2016 Gramophone (pages 100-101), Fabio Luisi, Joyce DiDonato, and Olga Kulchynska make up a team strong enough to carry on with little help. Martin Wheeler went even further in the September 2015 Opera News calling this “an unalloyed triumph” that more than deserved the “delirious applause” it received on opening night. Simon Thompson also reports for musicweb-internationsal.com in December 2016 that the lead singers and Luisi are all great notwithstanding Loy’s pessimistic staging.

Here’s the trailer from Opernhaus Zürich:

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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.