Orchestra & Chorus Of Teatro Real - Madrid Rustioni - Falstaff - BLU-RAY

Out of Giuseppe Verdi's adoration for William Shakespeare three masterpieces were born MacBeth, Otello and, as a musical testament, his only comedy Falstaff. But in accordance with it's librettist Arrigo Boito's wish to remove the original bourgeois farce The Merry Wives of Windsor out of the English mists and to warm it up to the clear Tuscan sun, Falstaff transforms Shakespeare's morality play into an ode to life, to pleasure and to reconciliation that forgives human vices, rewards intelligence and virtue, and praises that spark of madness that gives life it's flavor. Shakespeare's most famous and subversive comic character has indeed proved to be a fertile ground for Verdi who, then eighty-years old, signed with Falstaff his most modern, most ambitious, but also wisest and ambiguous opera. It was high time that French stage director Laurent Pelly, an eminent specialist of the buffa repertoire, tried out his talents on this whimsical music drama a task he performs with absolute maestria, highlighting with remarkable subtlety the numerous comic devices invented by Verdi and Boito but also pondering on the equivocal morality of the argument. He is, of course, helped in this endeavor by a wonderful team of singers from the excellent baritone Roberto de Candia to the earthy mezzo soprano Daniela Barcellona as Mrs. Quickly, without forgetting the exceptional Simone Piazzolla as Ford, the wonderfully lyrical Rebecca Evans as Alice, or the candid Ruth Iniesta and Joel Prieto as Nannetta and Fenton, the young couple whose tender romance counterpoint Falstaff's heroicomic gest. At the head of the Orchestra of the Teatro Real, conductor Daniele Rustioni underlines with unusual clarity and finesse the extraordinary complexity of this 'opus ultimum'.

Falstaff is Verdi's masterpiece of comic opera, in which the behavior of the ageing Sir John Falstaff, a devious freeloader and would-be ladykiller, causes uproar in the petty-bourgeois household of the Windsor's. In this performance stage and film director Mario Martone updates the action to the present day and shows Falstaff as ageing rebel in dodgy sideburns and leather jacket. Among the Inchexquisit vocal castInch (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Michael Volle gives his debut in the title role Inchwith masterly dynamic shadingsInch (Financial Times) and Inchas if he had been preparing for this role for a lifetime.Inch (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) while InchDaniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin are tickling out all the wit and all the momentum from this score.Inch (Online Merker)

Giacomo Puccini wrote what was supposed to be his last opera at a time where, riddled with disease and old age as he was, he felt like his own turmoil was reflected in the outside world itself staggering, unsteady, overwhelmed and smashed by the chaos of European diplomacy. In spite of these obstacles, he persevered and worked until the very end of his life on this opera that he left unfinished but that proved to be a Inchway outInch for him in many ways. Drawn from an ancient Persian epic from the 13th century, Turandot was indeed an excuse to escape into a new dramatic universe, one made of unexpected sounds and symbols. Here, in a world removed both geographically and chronologically from his own reality, he gave into the seductive powers of exoticism and eroticism, just as his own heroin Princess Turandot abandons herself to the mysteries of love and forgiveness. After twenty years of absence, Puccini's Turandot was revived on the stage of the Teatro Real in a new production by American stage director Robert Wilson. One of the most important theatre and visual artist of our times, the director who gave life to Philip Glass's Einstein of the Beach and who reinvented Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande hadn't worked on a Puccini opera in twenty-five years, since his ground-breaking Madama Butterfly commissioned by the Paris Opera in 1993. This new encounter between his powerful visual universe and Puccini's evocative music was bound to be an outstanding event. Carried out by a brilliant cast of singers, dominated by Irene Theorin as Turandot, Gregory Kunde as Calaf and Yolanda Auyanet as Liù, this magnificent production is conducted by the Teatro Real's associate musical director Nicola Luisotti - and has been met with universal acclaim.