Live from the Royal Opera 2008. David McVicar’s powerful 2008 production of Strauss's opera – based on a play by Oscar Wilde – takes the controversial and disturbing film 120 Days of Sodom as its visual reference. The action is set in a debauched palace, which has suggestions of Nazi Germany. Strauss’s ravishing and voluptuous score adds to the sexual alchemy that is conjured by an international cast led by Nadja Michael in the title role. Salome is filmed for the big screen with High Definition cameras and recorded in true surround sound.
Narraboth
First soldier
Second soldier
Herodias's page
A Cappadocian
A slave
Frank Martin puts the driving gloves on to deliver Valentina, the kidnapped daughter of a Ukranian government official, from Marseilles to Odessa on the Black Sea. En route, he has to contend with thugs who want to intercept Valentina's safe delivery and not let his personal feelings get in the way of his dangerous objective.
The joke's on absent-minded scientist Wayne Szalinski when his troublesome invention shrinks him, his brother and their wives so effectively that their children think they've completely disappeared. Of course, this gives the kids free rein to do anything they want, unaware that their parents are watching every move.
A cabdriver and a cop race to Paris to rescue a love interest and the Japanese minister of defense from kidnappers.
When a much-publicized ice-skating scandal strips them of their gold medals, two world-class athletes skirt their way back onto the ice via a loophole that allows them to compete together as a pairs team.
Chucky is reconstructed by a toy factory to dispel the negative publicity surrounding the doll, and tracks young Andy Barclay to a foster home where the chase begins again.
When a crime brings them back to L.A., fugitive ex-con Dom Toretto reignites his feud with agent Brian O'Conner. But as they are forced to confront a shared enemy, Dom and Brian must give in to an uncertain new trust if they hope to outmaneuver him. And the two men will find the best way to get revenge: push the limits of what's possible behind the wheel.
It's a jungle out there for Blu, Jewel and their three kids after they're hurtled from Rio de Janeiro to the wilds of the Amazon. As Blu tries to fit in, he goes beak-to-beak with the vengeful Nigel, and meets the most fearsome adversary of all: his father-in-law.
When Sid accidentally destroys Manny's heirloom Christmas rock and ends up on Santa's naughty list, he leads a hilarious quest to the North Pole to make things right and ends up making things much worse. Now it's up to Manny and his prehistoric posse to band together and save Christmas for the entire world!
Confident senior Jo begins the new school year by breaking her own cardinal rule: don't get involved in girl drama. but when she sees timid Abby preyed upon by Queen Bee Mandi and her minions, she takes sides in a viciously funny girl-world-war that turns North Shore High School upside down.
The evil Darth Sidious enacts his final plan for unlimited power -- and the heroic Jedi Anakin Skywalker must choose a side.
Moving from England to California, the youngest cousins of Elle Woods must defend themselves when their schools reigning forces turn on the girls and try to frame them for a crime.
Former Special Forces officer Frank Martin will deliver anything to anyone for the right price, and his no-questions-asked policy puts him in high demand. But when he realizes his latest cargo is alive, it sets in motion a dangerous chain of events. The bound and gagged Lai is being smuggled to France by a shady American businessman, and Frank works to save her as his own illegal activities are uncovered by a French detective.
Police chief Brody must protect the citizens of Amity after a second monstrous shark begins terrorizing the waters.
When one of his missteps puts his family in jeopardy, Tarzan decides they would be better off without him.
A scheming raccoon fools a mismatched family of forest creatures into helping him repay a debt of food, by invading the new suburban sprawl that popped up while they were hibernating – and learns a lesson about family himself.
A look at the lives of Carlo, Giulia, and their friends some 10 years after the events of L'Ultimo bacio.
A womanizing lawyer follows his wife and son to a trip to Egypt in a last-ditch effort to make up for his infidelities. Also travelling to Egypt is a bumbling police chief who's desperate to keep his rebellious daughter from becoming a showgirl. The two meet during a Nile cruise. Calamity ensues.
During China's Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as his wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.
This recording of the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue by Paul Dukas was staged at the Liceu in Barcelona in 2011, with Claus Guth as director, Stéphane Denève as conductor and José van Dam and Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet in the leading roles.
A one-off production of Boris Godunov was staged by Andrei Konchalovsky at the Teatro Regio in Torino in 2010, with Orlin Anastassov in the leading role and Gianandrea Noseda conducting the Orchestra del Teatro Regio.
A superb adaptation of Purcell's the Indian Queen, staged and directed by Peter Sellars and performed in 2013 at the Teatro Real in Madrid. Peters Sellars combines John Dryden and Robert Howard's libretto with a short-story written by the Nicaraguan writer Rosario Aguilar, La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies.
Beethoven's opera Fidelio, conducted by Karl Böhm, featuring Gwyneth Jones as Leonore and James King as Florestan
Based on a play by Jean Genet, a small-time thief battles with his gay cellmate over a third illiterate, muscular convict.
The Italian and international press were unanimous in their praise for "Peter Grimes" at La Scala, which revived the tradition of Britten's operas on the lyric stages of Italy. A top British cast was marshaled by the baton of Robin Ticciati. Richard Jones's production focuses on the fisherman as the outside in a brutal and brutalized 1980s society, cut off by mutual suspicion and misunderstanding: an unforgettable production of a 20th-century operatic masterpiece that never loses its power. Filmed in High Definition and recorded in true Surround Sound.
In the slums of the upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, a gang of Polish-American teenagers called the Jets compete with a rival gang of recently immigrated Puerto Ricans, the Sharks, to "own" the neighborhood streets. Tensions are high between the gangs but two romantics, one from each gang, fall in love leading to tragedy.
Aspiring Florida defense lawyer Kevin Lomax accepts a job at a New York law firm. With the stakes getting higher every case, Kevin quickly learns that his boss has something far more evil planned.
This rock opera tells the story of one year in the life of a group of bohemians struggling in late 1980s East Village, New York, USA. The film centers around Mark and Roger, two roommates. While a tragedy has made Roger numb to new experiences, Mark begins capturing their world through his attempts to make a personal movie. In the year that follows, they and their friends deal with love, loss, and working together.
Young and disenchanted Sam meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who's swimming in his building's pool one night. When she suddenly vanishes the next morning, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal and conspiracy.
37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.
‘In reality, this Lohengrin is an entirely new phenomenon for the modern consciousness!’ Richard Wagner himself understood the innovative character of his sixth piece of music theatre, completed in 1848, the year of revolutions. Although it is reckoned among his ‘romantic operas’, his new vision of musical drama is already clearly heralded in this work. In his hands, the mediaeval saga of the Knight of the Swan becomes a meditation on the true love that asks no questions. Alain Altinoglu, our Music Director, who has already conducted this work in Bayreuth, guarantees the quality of the music, while the director Olivier Py, known at La Monnaie for his brilliant productions of Les Huguenots and Hamlet, can be relied on not to downplay Wagner’s revolutionary political side. Wagner’s own opinion was that ‘one can only understand Lohengrin if one can liberate oneself from any modern-looking, generalising form of representation so as to see the phenomena of real life’. A challenge to us all?
One of Modest Mussorgsky's great talents was his unique ability to transpose words, psychological states, and even physical movements, into music. Kent Nagano rises magnificently to the challenges presented by this score. And Dmitri Tcherniakov's fascinating production emphasizes the timeless quality of this sombre tale of intrigue and power struggles reminiscent of a Greek tragedy, reflecting Mussorgsky's own maxim: "The past in the present - that is my task."
A staging of Britten's opera filmed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in June 2008.
Hester Collyer is rescued by a neighbor after attempting suicide in the flat she shares with her young lover, ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page. The neighbors alert her husband, who arrives at the flat only to find her fully recovered...
Can the darkest moments of life also lift our souls? Drawing on his own experience in a Siberian prison in the company of misfits, murderers and theives, Dostoevsky was inspired to write his novel Notes from a Dead House, telling his brother at the time: ‘Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior.’ In Janáček’s hands, Dostoevsky’s inspiration and the raw material drawn from an appalling world of incarceration find an even more powerful form of expression in his last opera, From the House of the Dead. Unfettered by conventional story-telling, Janáček wrote his own libretto, freely weaving together a series of stories of everyday prison life and of the fates of individual convicts.
Magic opera, Singspiel, a comedy with spectacular stage effects, Masonic ritual with Egyptian mysteries, heroic-comic opera? Die Zauberflöte is heard more often and has been more frequently performed, discussed, queried and interrogated than almost any other work in the history of opera. It is rare for the mysteriousness and multiformity of a work to be adjured with such mantric intensity. It is equally rare for a work to enjoy such undisputed success despite all these debates – and for over two hundred years at that.