Giacomo Puccini's immortal opera, in a high budget feature-film version directed by Academy Award nominee Robert Dornhelm, stars opera's 'Golden Couple', Rolando Villazon and Anna Netrebko as the protagonists, Rodolfo and Mimi. The chemistry between them is electric, unrivalled in the theatre...
Violetta, a courtesan much wooed by Parisian society, organizes a grand party that is attended, amongst others, by the young Alfredo Germont. He confesses his feelings to Violetta, who is already suffering from consumption. She vacillates between genuine affection and a realistic assessment of her...
Rigoletto is a jester in the court of the Duke of Mantua. He has a hunch-back and he's rather unattractive, but he's good at his job of humiliating the courtiers for the amusement of the Duke. The courtiers, of course, are not amused. The Duke is a ladies man who feels his life would be meaningless...
Benjamin Britten’s opera of the Henry James novel. An inexperienced governess is sent to a country house to care for two children, whom she is gradually convinced have been corrupted by the ghosts of a previous manservant and governess…
With a career that includes a 35-year tenure as composer of the Berlin Philharmonic and record sales topping 200 million, Herbert von Karajan is one of the most legendary figures in 20th-century classical music. Comprised of archival footage, performance highlights and interviews with the likes of...
Internationally acclaimed Chinese film-maker Chen Kaige delivers an opulent staging of the fairy-tale story of Chinese Princess Turandot, who will only marry a prince capable of solving her riddles. With sumptuous costumes and palace sets designed in China, Kaige's production adds a compellingly...
A concert-film using innovative cinematic techniques to set music to images. As conductor Herbert von Karajan didn't like the experimental style, he had the film re-edited severely before release.
Leonard Bernstein narrated by legendary screen star Lauren Bacall. The movie also relies extensively on Bernstein's own words to provide the counterpoint to the abundant visual material. Highlights include excerpts of Bernstein conducting masterworks by Beethoven and Mahler, as well as of the...
In the early 1960s two artistic giants, conductor Herbert von Karajan and director Franco Zeffirelli, joined forces to create this milestone production of Puccini’s masterpiece at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala. Filmed in that legendary opera house in 1965, with Zeffireli himself directing for the...
A spectacular production of Aida filmed at Bregenz Festival's lakeside stage in 2009, with Carlo Rizzi conducting the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra and the Polish Radio Choir.
Sergei S. Prokofiev's monumental setting of Leo N. Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace. The composer and his wife Mira compressed the plot, set during Napoleon's Russian campaign, into a powerful sequence of scenes in which the love story between Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky and the...
This 1978 studio production of the prologue to Wagner's masterpiece is the only segment of the famous Salzburg Festival/Metropolitan Opera productions, first seen in the 1960s, that made it to film. Based on one of those original productions, Georges Wakhevitch produced stage settings and...
Anja Harteros excels in the title role of Michael Sturminger’s cinematic staging of Puccini’s “Tosca”, the centrepiece of Salzburg Easter Festival. Aleksandrs Antoņenko compellingly portrays Cavaradossi, while Ludovic Tézier is a thrillingly malevolent Scarpia. Christian Thielemann leads...
Not every fairytale starts with the usual formula of “Once upon a time…”. However, all fairytales touch us with the power of their inherent fantasy. They blend the beautiful and the eerie into a magical world between dreams and reality. Hollywood and fairytales have developed a very special...
A film version of the ballet Giselle. Filmed in a studio, using innovative editing and cinematography to go along with the choreography, this film stands out from filmed stage-performances.
