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1) Italian café
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Italiano
Description
"[A] collection of classic and contemporary Italian songs [that] will transport you to the romantic cafes of Rome, Milan and Venice"--Container.
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Rossini's comic masterpiece was based on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais's French play Le Barbier de Séville and is the ultimate opera buffa. The score is a compendium of the composer's wittiest and most brilliant writing, and includes the famous entrance aria Largo al factotum and a raft of superbly dynamic ensembles. This vibrant and youthful production features Florian Sempey, one of the world's best Figaros, the 'Rossini tenor' Michele...
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Set in the artistic but impoverished milieu of early 19th-century Paris, the tragic love of the poet Rodolfo and seamstress Mimì is one of the most affecting in all opera. La Bohème's arias are also some of the most intensely passionate Puccini ever wrote, making it is one of the best-loved of all his works. In what Opera News called a 'thorough rethinking and brilliant re-creation' this exceptional Oslo production, strongly cast and conducted,...
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Rigoletto is regarded as the first operatic masterpiece of Verdi's mature artistic period. Its complex psychology identifies characters with different styles of music, and with an incredible variety of accents for a central figure conceived by the composer as 'deformed and laughable, but actually passionate and full of love'. From the famous aria La donna è mobile, to the final horrific tragedy as the curse unfolds, the triumphant success of Rigoletto...
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The composition of Un ballo in maschera caused Verdi many problems. What began as an opera called Gustavo III was subject to censorship by the Neapolitan and Roman authorities, so its libretto, location and title all changed. The subject, however, is still the murder of Riccardo (Gustavo) at the masked ball, couched in a musical language in which the seriousness of Italian opera is infused with French vivacity. The opera's structure is carefully symmetrical...
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Falstaff was composed to a libretto fashioned by Arrigo Boito largely from Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Superficially the work is an opera buffa in its depiction of the travails of the penniless knight, Sir John Falstaff, but goes beyond the operatic tradition of the time. The vocal line is integrated into the orchestral texture, and with self-quotations and parodic elements, the opera is saturated with as much irony as comedy, forming...
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Giuseppe Verdi travelled to St Petersburg in 1862 to premiere La forza del destino, which had been commissioned by the city's Imperial Theatre. The source material appealed to the composer's sense of tragic intensity and the ruthlessness of destiny. The local audience was accustomed to 18th-century Italian opera as well as French grand opéra, and the resulting work is a synthesis of aristocratic drama and popular comedy. In 1869 he revised the work...
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Monteverdi's L'Orfeo was premiered in 1607 and is the oldest opera still performed today. The narrative is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus who, armed only with the weapons of music and love, descends into Hades in an attempt to bring his lost bride Eurydice back to the living world. The opera's dramatic power is brought to life in this acclaimed production conducted by the great Monteverdi expert and interpreter Jordi Savall. Filmed at the Opéra...
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Gabriel Faurè considered Umberto Giordano's Siberia to be one of the most interesting and singular works of the early 20th century. The opera's tragic narrative follows Prince Alexis's courtesan Stephana. She falls in love with an innocent soldier, Vassili, who is sent to Siberia for killing the Prince. Stephana gives up her life of luxury to follow him but cannot escape her past. With its intensely Russian atmosphere and passionately soaring melodies,...
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Alessandro Scarlatti is one of the key figures of Italian Baroque opera and the influential Neapolitan school in particular. Griselda is the last of Scarlatti's operas to have survived intact to the present day. Its narrative is set in motion by the marriage of the King of Sicily to a poor shepherdess; the ensuing complications of love and the tensions between country and court delivering an entertainment full of lyrical charm and lively action. Performed...
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A pioneer in the development of opera, Claudio Monteverdi took vocal music beyond Renaissance polyphony into an era in which genuine feelings and emotions could be expressed. Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is part of a late flowering in Monteverdi's illustrious career, and is considered the most profoundly tender and moving of his operas. Its hero Ulysses is forced to undergo cruel tests, hardships, treachery and deception before he can be reunited...
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Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur was inspired by the real-life story of a celebrated actress at the Comédie-Française who was much admired by Voltaire. Hailed as a masterpiece, the opera was triumphantly staged in cities around the world after its premiere in 1902. The dramatically effective narrative is a passionate love triangle filled with intrigue and complicated plot twists set in the gallant 18th century. Its subtle ironies and gorgeous...
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Donizetti's three-act tragic opera Belisario was a resounding success in its day, driven by its composer's superlative theatrical instinct and his skilful interweaving of intense tragic narrative and emotional pathos. Belisario is betrayed by his wife Antonina, who falsely accuses him of high treason. Belisario is blinded and exiled, with proof of his innocence coming too late, and is mortally wounded during a final military victory. This production...
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Bianca e Fernando, commissioned for the inauguration of the Carlo Felice Theatre in 1828, was composed at the start of Bellini's career as one of the most important opera composers of the 19th century. The superb music for this dramatic story of filial love, wicked intrigues and triumph over tyranny was received with the 'jubilation and admiration of the citizens of Genoa' and greatly admired by the likes of Donizetti, earning Bellini recognition...
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Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore is a melodrama giocoso in two acts and has remained one of the world's most popular and often performed operas. Nemorino is in love with Adina, who is indifferent, but eventually falls for him, helped by the huckster Dr Dulcamara's elixir (in reality, cheap red wine). This performance restores cuts and is heard in full, as Donizetti intended, played on original instruments of the time at the original pitch. This allows...
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Building on the success of Cavalleria rusticana, Pietro Mascagni's commedia lirica L'amico Fritz was given seven encores and thirty-five curtain calls at its premiere in Rome in 1891. Considered by critics to be one of Mascagni's best operas, the story is that of a love triangle involving the wealthy Fritz Kobus and Suzel, daughter of one of his tenants, who together sing the famous 'Cherry Duet' in Act II. Returning to the Teatro del Maggio Musicale...
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Giuseppe Verdi was well on the way towards renown and prosperity when he took up the story of Violetta, a famed courtesan whose intensely romantic and colourful but tragically brief life marked the emergence of realism into Italian opera. Verdi and Alexandre Dumas fils intended this melodrama to have a contemporary setting, and David Livermore's stunning production maintains this wish by placing his elegant and powerful cast firmly into the 20th century....
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Nicola Porpora was a composer who helped to turn Italian opera into the most successful and spectacular genre in Europe. One of the few luminaries of the 'Neapolitan School' to actually be born in Naples, Porpora wrote L'Angelica, a serenade for six voices and instruments, to a libretto by the young Pietro Metastasio in 1720. The work was composed for the birthday of Empress Elizabeth Christine, wife of Charles VI, and its plot is comedic, focusing...
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