Pygmalion Pichon - Ercole Amante - BLU-RAY

Francesco Cavalli, a natural successor to Monteverdi, was the most famous and influential Italian opera composer during the mid-17th century. Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister to the king, commissioned Cavalli to create a Parisian spectacle to celebrate the wedding of the 'Sun King' Louis XIV and the Infanta of Spain. Ercole amante ('Hercules in Love') was the flattering subject chosen for this regal extravaganza combining larger-than-life characters with mythology, and genuine human emotions with natural and cosmic phenomena. The result is a sumptuous Baroque spectacle, conceived on a vast scale in this lavish production by directors Valerie Lesort and Christian Hecq.

The lavish princely entertainments that were given in Italy since the Renaissance, and in particular at the Medici Court in Florence, were famous throughout Europe. The musical interludes that adorned them were already true dramatic masterpieces which marvelously combined music and poetry. They set a frame for the birth of the Italian Opera, Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607) being their direct heir with it's almost perfect architecture, the depth of it's expression and the immanent beauty of it's music. In a state of grace, Raphaël Pichon invites you to discover these Italian splendors, by imagining a princely interlude conceived with the most sumptuous pieces of music of the turn of the 1600s that is both true opera scenes but also gigantic polychoral pieces for thirty voices. All of them filmed here in the most beautiful palatial Gallery in the World namely, we invite you on a dreamlike musical journey in the Hall of Mirrors of the Château de Versailles.

Luca Pisaroni, Veronica Cangemi, Jeremy Ovenden, and Anna Maria Panzarella star in this production of the Amante opera with Ivor Bolto conducting Concerto Koeln and the Chorus of de Nederlandse Opera.