DVD Reviews
VERDI Simon Boccanegra – Aug 24, 2011
The raison d’être for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010 revival of their Giancarlo del Monaco-directed production of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was, presumably, to showcase Plácido [...]
DONIZETTI Don Pasquale – Jul 25, 2011
When Anna Netrebko sang Norina in the first season of Otto Schenk’s Metropolitan Opera production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in 2006, she proved something [...]
HANDEL Belshazzar – Jul 15, 2011
Belshazzar, a splendid oratorio from 1745, has ample dramatic content for a cogent staging, the appearance of the famous “handwriting on the wall” (as [...]
MARTHA ARGERICH & MISCHA MAISKY – Jul 13, 2011
Neither Martha Argerich nor Mischa Maisky is synonymous with new commissions, making their premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s Romantic Offering the more notable. Eighty next [...]
HANDEL Messiah – May 25, 2011
Director Claus Guth’s operatic re-imagining of Handel’s Messiah for Vienna’s Theater an der Wien in 2009 – a production recently released on DVD and [...]
CARLOS KLEIBER I Am Lost to the World; Traces to Nowhere – May 20, 2011
Reclusive, brilliant, insecure, famously self-critical – a poetic perfectionist who was as fanatically demanding of himself as he was of the artists he chose [...]
MAHLER Des Knaben Wunderhorn; Symphony No. 10 – Adagio – May 18, 2011
Marking Pierre Boulez’s 45-year relationship with The Cleveland Orchestra and recorded, on February 11-13, 2010, just six weeks before his own 85th birthday, this [...]
MOZART Don Giovanni; Così fan tutte – May 13, 2011
For the 250th Mozart birthday celebrations in 2006, stage director Claus Guth devised a revelatory production of Le nozze di Figaro for the Salzburg [...]
MAHLER Symphony No.9 – Mar 04, 2011
Even allowing that 2010 was 150 years since Mahler’s birth, and 2011 is the centenary of his death, we have lived in Mahler-sated times [...]
JAMES LEVINE Celebrating 40 Years at the Met (DVDs) – Feb 28, 2011
After decades of guarding its vast audio and video archives like Fafner keeping watch over the Rhinegold, the Metropolitan Opera is finally offering recorded [...]
