Known for Acting
This tribute to James Levine, first shown on PBS, was only part of that glorious evening. Here we have the whole performance, up to three hours. I could not stop watching these discs. Let me say this much; Levine has done for the Met, making it the premier opera house in the world, what Karajan did with the Berlin, making it one of the finest orchestras ever. So sit back and enjoy.
Puccini's Il Tabarro & Leoncavallo's Pagliacci; Pavarotti and Domingo star in MET 1994-1995 season opener.
Verdi's opera performed by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by James Levine.
Verdi - Un ballo in maschera / Domingo · Barstow · Quivar · Jo · Nucci · Rydl · Chaignaud · Wiener Phil. · Solti · Schlesinger · Salzburg Festival 1900
Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) is an 1859 opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The text, by Antonio Somma, was based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Daniel Auber's 1833 five act opera, Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué. The plot concerns the assassination in 1792 of King Gustav III of Sweden who was shot, as the result of a political conspiracy, while attending a masked ball, dying of his wounds thirteen days later.
In this legendary production, director John Dexter and designer David Reppa brilliantly captured the stark drama of Poulenc’s only full-length opera, which tells the story of a group of nuns caught in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. Maria Ewing is Blanche de la Force, an aristocratic novice who flees her convent when it is desecrated, only to return and join her fellow nuns as they are led to their execution. The legendary Régine Crespin, in her final Met appearance, is Madame de Croissy, the prioress whose agonizing death haunts Blanche. Jessye Norman sings Mother Lidoine, the new prioress, and Florence Quivar is the comforting Mother Marie. French maestro Manuel Rosenthal conducts.
