DVD

Adriano Morselli’s tangled operatic plot knots together the passions, jealousies and cut-throat ambitions of three rivals with their sights on the Persian princess Statira – or, rather, on her dowry: the throne of Persia.

This last opera of Bellini’s may not be his greatest work – obviously Norma is that – but it is full of lovely music.

This Salzburg production was billed as a recreation of Herbert von Karajan’s classic 1967 staging, but on this DVD ‘recreation’ acquires inverted commas – advisedly, because it’s nothing of the sort. 

British tenor Paul Agnew tackles an operatic triathlon here, as soloist (in the roles of Eco and Apollo), and as both musical and stage director of this new production of L’Orfeo filmed at the Théâtre de Caen. His mise en scène paints a series of pastoral tableaux with apt simplicity – a welcome change from the anachronisms directors often impose on early opera (though the singers’ actions would have benefitted from a little more direction).

The Rite of Spring does not dominate here, not because the performance is lame. Rather, it is part of something truly exceptional, joined here by masterpieces from Webern, Berg and Ligeti in performances of outstanding beauty, passion and power. This film captures a concert at the Barbican from January 2015, when the public courtship between the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle was still ongoing and their artistic marriage not yet certain.

Just four years after its 1844 premiere, Verdi described this early opera as ‘a funeral with too uniform an atmosphere and colour from beginning to end’. There is some justification for this criticism: the opera presents a single dramatic situation that worsens rather than alters over the course of its three acts. Nevertheless it offers central roles with considerable potential, notably that of the elder of the two Foscari of the title – the Venetian doge unable to save his son from exile and himself from humiliating dismissal.

Sir Simon Rattle’s first Tosca was always going to be an event. Whether it was intended to be this kind of event is difficult to tell. The extremes of tempo and colour from the Berlin Philharmonic in the first minutes of Philipp Himmelmann’s Baden-Baden Easter Festival production are enough to make one’s hair stand on end: a visceral rush of energy that deliquesces into an oily pool of heavily perfumed sound, reminiscent of being trapped in a high-performance sports car with a man who is wearing far too much aftershave. 

First staged on 12 September 2016, the Royal Opera’s new Normawas the work of Spanish director Alex Ollé, one of the artistic co-directors of the theatre group La Fura dels Baus. In a programme note included with this DVD/Blu-ray release he asks the rhetorical questions, ‘Some will see [Norma] as a traitor to her country and her religion, but what is she really guilty of having done? Falling in love?

Macbeth is the first of Verdi’s great Shakespearean operas. Much earlier than the others, it doesn’t compare with the original play in complexity or depth, but is still a major departure for the composer – especially the revised version, which is what is performed here.

American-born Wunderkind Kit Armstrong – mathematician, linguist, juggler, origamist, composer, pianist, to name but a few of his talents – is without doubt one of the most prodigiously gifted polymaths of our day. This thoughtfully planned recital, given last year, before a rapt and silent audience at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, sets Bach’s Goldbergs in the context of the keyboard school that preceded it. Armstrong reveals a subtle web of connections between Bach, the Dutch organist Jan Sweelinck and the English Virginalists John Bull and William Byrd.

When it opened in June 2015, the first night of the Royal Opera production of William Tell attracted a storm of protest, much of it occasioned by a protracted gang-rape scene that many observers found both gratuitous and offensive; the booing for the production team resumed at their curtain call.

This is an uneven performance and production of Wagner’s last drama, likely to confuse newcomers to the work and to leave anyone familiar with it with mixed feelings. Iván Fischer is capable of great things, and with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the pit there are bound to be some wonderful sounds in this subtlest and also most piercing of Wagner’s scores. Even so, the Preludes to Acts I and III are smooth and nerveless, while that to Act II is a phenomenal whirlwind.

Annabel Arden’s Glyndebourne production of Rossini’s comedy combines her taste for physical comedy with psychologically specific performances and – courtesy of Joanna Parker’s vividly coloured sets and costumes – some warm Spanish sunshine. There’s an element of the absurd to the humour, too, though the presence of three manic mimes on stage, regularly intervening in the action and thereby upping the quotient of mayhem, is arguably a step too far.