Lucile Richardot - The Monteverdi Trilogy - DVD

?2017 marked the 450th anniversary of the birth of Claudio Monteverdi - one of the founders of opera and hailed in his day as 'the creator of modern music'. Monteverdi transformed vocal music beyond Renaissance polyphony into an entirely new genre that expressed powerful feelings and emotions within a gripping narrative. This set brings together Monteverdi's three surviving operas the splendorous L'Orfeo and, from later in his life, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea with their visceral passions and dramatic dilemmas, all elements that have animated the history of opera for centuries. John Eliot Gardiner's acclaimed Monteverdi 450 series of semi-staged performances produced in Venice's historical Teatro La Fenice is a living confirmation that Monteverdi 'will be sighed for in later ages, for his compositions will surely outlive the ravages of time.'

Opera was in it's infancy when Monteverdi wrote L'Orfeo, only six years after the first example of a drama set wholly to music had been performed in Florence. He brought to the work a revolutionary synthesis of text, staging and musical architectural that virtually defined the future of opera. John Eliot Gardiner first conducted L'Orfeo at the Proms in London in 1967. For decades he has been at the forefront of Monteverdi performance and scholarship and in 2017, the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi's birth, and the 50th anniversary of his own first performance of the opera, he undertook the crowning achievement of his association with the composer, an odyssey to perform all three surviving full-length operas. This performance of L'Orfeo was given at the historic Teatro La Fenice in Venice - which has seen triumphant premieres of works by Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and many others - in a critically acclaimed semi-staged production.

On the brink of Civil War, King Henry IV (John Gielgud) attempts to consolidate his reign while fretting with unease over his son's seeming neglect of his royal duties. Hal (Keith Baxter), the young Prince, openly consorts with Sir John Falstaff (Orson Welles) and his company of InchDiana's foresters, Gentlemen of the shade, Minions of the moonInch. Hal's friendship with the fat knight substitutes for his estrangement from his father. Both Falstaff and the King are old and tired; both rely on Hal for comfort in their final years, while the young Prince, the future Henry V, nurtures his own ambitions.Orson Welles considered Chimes at Midnight his personal favorite of all his films. Perhaps the most radical and groundbreaking of all Shakespeare adaptations, the film condenses the Bard's Henriad cycle into a single focused narrative. It's international cast comprises of Jeanne Moreau, Fernando Rey, Margaret Rutherford, and Ralph Richardson as the narrator, in addition to Welles and Gielgud. The film's harrowing war scenes have proven especially influential, cited in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V as well as Mel Gibson's Braveheart.