Il trovatore — HDVDARTS

Verdi Il trovatore opera to a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare. Directed 2012 by Dmitri Tcherniakov at La Monnaie / De Munt. Stars Misha Didyk (Manrico), Marina Poplavskaya (Leonora), Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo (Azucena), Scott Hendricks (Il Conte di Luna), and Giovanni Furlanetto (Ferrando). Marc Minkowski conducts the Orchestre symphonique de la Monnaie and the Choeurs de la Monnaie. Set and costume design by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Directed for TV by Andy Sommer. Sung in Italian. Released 2014, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

Poor Mike Ashman wrote a 600-word review of this Il trovatore in the February 2015 Gramophone at pages 94-95. Dmitri Tcherniakov's reworking of the libretto was so complete and strange that Ashman was left confused and confounded. Here's the most clear and competent statement Ashman makes in his review: "The Mona Lisa has a mustache on but we've learnt nothing new about her." If you "get" the previous statement, you might like this production of Il trovatore.

Here’s a trailer from BelAir:

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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.