Orchestra E Coro Del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Galli - Il Tabarro - DVD

This production is new staging of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Il Tabarro is one of the three one-act operas that compose Giacomo Puccini's Il Trittico. Michele is married to young Giorgetta and shares with her a life full of hardships on a barge over the river Seine. She is in love with Luigi, a young longshoreman hired by her husband during the loading of the barge. When Michele overhears his wife giving a rendezvous to Luigi by night, he waits for the man and attacks him, forces him to admit he is his wife's lover and finally strangles him. Then he hides the body under his cloak, (il tabarro) and when Giorgetta, in mortal fear, comes on deck and asks Michele if he does not wish her to come and rest near him under his cloak, her wronged husband throws it open and Giorgetta discovers in horror her dead lover's body rolling at her feet. The element of Didier Gold's Houppelande that most attracted Puccini was the opportunity to represent, in music, a river, which is what acts as a backdrop in this plot and determines it's pace. The importance of this atmosphere is enormous, because it is linked to the mise en scene more tightly than usual. The action entirely takes place on a barge over the Seine in Paris, which is placed in the centre of the scene. The music describing the river uses a cyclic repetition of ostinato patterns, representing the monotonous flowing of the water, as inexorable as destiny and as regular as the flow of time. The pulse of the river cyclically marks, in the first part of Tabarro, the life of this world of vanquished longshoremen and boatmen. But even when it disappears, the musical identity between drama and location does not cease to exist.

When Il trittico premiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera in December 1918, Gianni Schicchi became an immediate hit. The libretto is based on an incident mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. The action in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi takes place in Buoso Donati's bedroom in 13th-century Florence, immediately after his death, as his greedy relatives feign grief and search for his will. The mood shifts to anger when the relatives discover that they have been disinherited. They seek out the clever and resourceful Schicchi to make a counterfeit will. Schicchi, however, turns their scheme against them, bequeathing most of the dead man's fortune to himself while the relatives, all parties to the crime of forgery, are forced to sit by silently. The aria O mio babbino caro is one of Puccini's most popular arias for soprano. Bruno de Simone plays the character of Gianni Schicchi. As Italy's finest basso buffo, he is perfect for this role. Puccini completed the score on 20 April, 1918, eight months before the scheduled premiere. At that performance it was presented as the third part of a trilogy of newly written one-act operas by Puccini billed as Il trittico (The Triptych); the first two were Il tabarro (The Cloak) and Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica). Il tabarro was a dark tragedy and Suor Angelica a sweet one, so by closing with Gianni Schicchi Puccini rounded off the night with a high-spirited comic farce. Critical reaction at the time judged that Gianni Schicchi was Inchan uproarious delightInch, and it was the most favorably received of the three.

Al Pacino and Robert de Niro appear on-screen together for the first time in writer/director Michael Mann's intense crime drama. Frazzled LAPD detective Lt. Vincent Hanna (Pacino) is out to stop a group of highly skilled professional thieves headed by mastermind Neil McCauley (De Niro), who's looking for one last score. The stakes rise to dangerous levels as Hanna and McCauley become locked in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Tom Sizemore, and Jon Voight co-star. 172 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English. Two-disc set.