Il trovatore — HDVDARTS

Verdi Il trovatore opera to a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare. Directed 2013 by Philipp Stölzl. Stars Plácido Domingo (Count di Luna), Anna Netrebko (Leonora), Marina Prudenskaya (Azucena), Gaston Rivero (Manrico), Adrian Sâmpetrean (Ferrando), Anna Lapkovskaja (Inez), and Florian Hoffman (Ruiz). Daniel Barenboim conducts the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Staatsopernchor Bersin (Chorus Master Martin Wright). Co-direction and choreography by Mara Kurotschka; set design by Philipp Stölzl and Conrad Moritz; costume design by Ursula Kudrna; lighting design by Olaf Freese. Directed for TV by Tiziano Mancini. Sung in Italian. Released 2014, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

Richard Fairman, writing in the November 2014 Gramophone (pages 93-94) praises the singers but abandons ship due to Philipp Stölzl's "childish production."

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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.