With the help of more than 10,000 dedicated Zappa fans, this is the long-awaited definitive documentary project of Alex Winter documenting the life and career of enigmatic groundbreaking rock star Frank Zappa. Alex also utilizes in this picture thousands of hours of painstakingly digitized videos,...
Utilizing potent TV interviews and many forgotten performances from his 30-year career, we are immersed into Frank Zappa’s world while experiencing two distinct facets of his complex character. At once Zappa was both a charismatic composer who reveled in the joy of performing and, in the next...
With this wonderful production, Mozart’s “Munich” opera returns to the place where it was first performed in 1781, the lovingly restored Cuvilliés Theatre, a veritable jewel of Rococo architecture. In Dieter Dorn’s production, the characters are real people of flesh and blood, their...
A one-hour documentary on the making of Frank Zappa's bizarre 1971 comic musical. Vintage private footage from Frank's personal archives plus behind-the-scenes of the actual shooting and recording. With Ringo Starr, Theodore Bikel, Keith Moon and such songs as "Sleeping in a Jar," and "Strictly...
The Rake's Progress is an English-language opera from 1951 in three acts and an epilogue by Igor Stravinsky. The libretto, written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings A Rake's Progress (1733–1735) of William Hogarth, which Stravinsky had seen...
John Adams: A Portrait and A Concert of Modern American Music
02000HD
Peer into the world of contemporary composer John Adams with this documentary that blends performance footage with insightful interviews and commentary from his collaborators and the master himself. Highlights include performances of Adams's Grammy Award-winning operas “Nixon in China” and...
A documentary about Nikolaus Lehnhoff's 2004 production of Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. Interviews, behind-the-scenes footage and clips of the live performances provide a documentary analysis of the opera on the quest for the holy grail.
The first ever performances in Munich, this production was entrusted to Dmitri Tcherniakov, whose worldwide reputation is underpinned by productions like Eugene Onegin and Macbeth at the Paris Opera and Don Giovanni at Aix-en- Provence. The superb international cast includes a fine Blanche de la...
Wagner's Lohengrin is the mythical tale of the mysterious Knight of the Grail, who appears to defend the princess Elsa - wrongly accused of the murder of her brother. Highlights of Wagner's most lyrical score include the famous Wedding March, which accompanies the marriage of Lohengrin and Elsa. ...
The opera, inspired by Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae, is as seductive as it is topical: When Dionysus – is he a charlatan? is he a demigod? – bursts into the intact world of ancient Thebes, he plunges a city into chaos. In stark contrast to his cousin, King Pentheus, who leads a life marked...
With neat, plain building-block designs by Jacques Rapp, Louis Erlo's energetically-staged production of Prokofiev's surreal fairy-tale for the Lyon Opera is full of cartoon characters and swift farce. Based on a play by Carlo Gozzi, "L'Amour des Trois Oranges" tells the story of a doleful,...
The document explores Leonard Bernstein's various facets as a conductor, a composer, a pianist and most of all a teacher and how he influenced so many people. It includes interviews of his children, former conductor students, orchestra members, collabrators and other acquintanses. - Pascal Kay
At the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, the stage director Nikolaus Lehnhoff signs a remarkable production of Wagner's LOHENGRIN, the third of the German composer's main operas. This production stars an incredible cast, including Hans-Peter König, Klaus Florian Vogt, Solveig Kringelborn, Tom Fox and...
An adaptation of Leos Janacek's opera Prihody Lisky Bystrousky (1925), based on the novel Liska Bystrouska by Rudolf Tesnohlidek. It follows the life of Sharp-Ears, a fox who is captured by a forester as a cub and raised in his home prior to escaping back into the forest.
Headlined by Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White and orchestrated by the Berlin German Symphony Orchestra, this Nativity oratorio from composer John Adams tells the magical story of the birth of Christ. Conducted by renowned maestro Kent Nagano, this moving experience draws on...
