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- The rare biblical opera 'David and Jonathas' is like 'Médée', one of the major works of the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The opera has been in the repertoire of Les Arts Florissants since 1988 and was first presented in a stage production by William Christie at the Aix-en-Provence Festival 2012. This DVD release is a special event for all Baroque music lovers. Written a year after the death of Lully, this lyric tragedy allows Charpentier to develop beyond the religious dimension, a story of male friendship and forbidden love between David and Jonathas. An excellent cast gathered around William Christie and Les Arts Florissants brings young singers to the title roles: Pascal Charbonneau, a tenor and a former student of the European Academy of Music, sings David. The role of Jonathas is given to a woman: soprano Ana Quintans. The staging by Andreas Homoki (Director of the Zurich Opera since summer 2012) focuses on the psychological aspect of this forbidden love story, giving a moving reading of the drama.
- As the first collaboration ever between conductor William Christie and director Luc Bondy, this production of Hercules was the major event of the 2004 opera season. Originally Created in Aix-en-Provence in July 2004, the show then moved on to the Palais Garnier in Paris where it was recorded in December of the same year. The Hercules received the student prize at the Golden Prague 2005.
- Philippe Boesmans sign his fourth opera with Julie. Harking back to the model of the chamber opera, the composer focused on the chemistry of human relationships that lead heroine of the drama of Strindberg to end his life. Three voices, a chamber orchestra, a unique place, a night time make us witness the fate of this young woman touching. Composer in residence at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie for nearly 20 years, the Belgian Philippe Boesmans, born in 1936, is undoubtedly a major figure in the musical landscape of our time. Julie is an intimate work, a chamber opera in one act, based on the drama of the Swedish August Strindberg's Miss Julie, written in 1888. Boesmans music is very personal: his writing is dense and precise, rich and colorful, delicate and colorful and his writing for the voice proves that with opera, the composer was in his natural element.
- Based, in part, on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is Verdi's last work for the stage - and only his second comic opera. And yet the humour in this multilayered masterpiece is distinctly wry, for all the main characters exhibit an array of human weaknesses that are implacably exposed by Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito.
- In the prologue Fortune, Virtue and Cupid argue about their respective powers. Love sets out to demonstrate his supremacy, in what follows. In the street outside Poppaea's house, Otho complains at her infidelity. He was her lover, but now she is sleeping within with Nero, the Emperor, while his two soldiers guard the house. The couple emerge, as dawn breaks, and sing of their love. With her nurse Arnalta Poppaea reveals her ambition to become Empress, while elsewhere Octavia, Empress, wife of Nero, and of the imperial family of Augustus, laments her husband's desertion. Seneca tries to comfort her, mocked by her page, and is warned by Pallas Athene of his coming death. Nevertheless he dares to advise his old pupil, Nero, that he should not cast aside Octavia. Nero insists that he will go his own way. Otho overhears Nero and Poppaea, he promising to make her Empress and she urging the discarding of Seneca, whose death Nero now orders. Otho is definitively rejected by Poppaea
