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.
Don Giovanni, opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Italian libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte) that premiered at the original National Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787. The opera’s subject is Don Juan, the notorious libertine of fiction, and his eventual descent into hell. For Mozart, it was an unusually intense work, and it was not entirely understood in his own time. Within a generation, however, it was recognized as one of the greatest of all operas. Presented by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre with narration provided by Sir Peter Ustinov.
It's hard to imagine confirmed Straussians not wanting this starry Metropolitan Opera performance of Elektra. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, transformed Sophocles' take on Homer's tale into a harrowing opera noir. Elektra lives for one reason, to kill her mother, Klytämnestra, and her stepfather, Aegisth, the murderers of her father, Agamemnon. In contrast to Elektra's vengeful obsession, her sister Chrysothemis desires to get on with life. When their long-missing brother, Orestes, returns to do the deed, Elektra celebrates with a dance of death and, her sole purpose in life fulfilled, dies. Strauss joined the hermetic plot to music of the utmost opulence, violent and yearning by turns, evoking the cardinal principles of Greek tragedy - pity and terror.
The Metropolitan Opera live production of Richard Strauss's opera Elektra on February 16, 1980
Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers star in this filmed record of the Theatre Antique d'Orange's acclaimed 1973 production of Wagner's epic tale of doomed love in the Middle Ages. Tristan und Isolde also features the Orchestre National de R.T.F., under the direction of Karl Bohm.
In the autumn of 1968, Director Eric M. Nilsson and film team accompany Swedish opera singer Birgit Nilsson during the many-faceted events of her life, on and off stage.
Stimulantia is a 1967 Swedish anthology film comprising eight episodes by eight different directors including Ingmar Bergman, Jörn Donner, Gustaf Molander and Vilgot Sjöman and starring among others Ingrid Bergman, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lars Ekborg and Inga Landgré.
Watching the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, and a stellar cast record Wagner's immense Götterdämmerung for Decca in the fall of 1964 provides a thousand lessons in the art of working under pressure. For this classic documentary, The Golden Ring, a BBC camera crew eavesdropped as producer John Culshaw guided his engineering team through tricky technical maneuvers far removed from the relative ease of modern digital editing. What utter concentration and focus Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Gottlob Frick, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau bring to their collective and individual singing! Solti, for his part, oozes energy and exactitude as he pleads for greater precision and frets over details in the car en route to the sessions.
