Adriana Lecouvreur

Francesco Cilea Adriana Lecouvreur opera to libretto by Arturo Colautti. Directed 2021 by Frederic Wake-Walker at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Stars Martin Muehle (Maurizio), Alessandro Spina (Prince de Bouillon), Paolo Antognetti (Abbé de Chazeuil), Nicola Alaimo (Michonnet), Davide Piva (Quinault), Antonio Garés (Poisson), Michele Gianquinto (Major-domo), Maria José Siri (Adriana Lecouvreur), Ksenia Dudnikova (Princess de Bouillon), Chiara Mogini (Mademoiselle Jouvenot), and Valentina Corò (Mademoiselle Dangeville). Also stars dancers Anna Olkhovaya, Chiara Ferrara, Erika Rombaldoni, Giulia Mostacchi, Sebastiano Marino, and Matteo Zorzoli. Daniel Harding conducts the Orchestra e Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Set design by Polina Liefers; costume design by Julia Katharina Berndt; lighting design by Marco Faustini; choreography Anna Olkhovaya. Directed for TV by Tiziano Mancini. Sung in Italian. Released in 2022, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

Tim Ashley applauds the singers and orchestra in his review of this at page 97 of the January 2023 Gramophone. But he disapproves of Wake-Walker’s approach of “theater as artifice” in which the HT audience is “never allowed to forget for a second that what we are watching is an illusion.” Does this suggest you should buy the CD instead of the Blu-ray? Well, it appears there is no CD. And Gramophone gave the Blu-ray it’s Video of the Month Award. The rather perfunctory trailer below doesn’t help us much. We need another review of this!

Here’s a clip from Naxos:

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Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, fine-art documentaries, and paintings. In the journal below are independent (and hard-to-find critical) reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.

Feb 25. We have just completed one of our most ambitious reviews: Einstein on the Beach opera, the surreal 4 and 1/2 hour cult legend. Kudos, encomiums, and accolades to Opus Arte for giving us this authoritative and weirdly fascinating recording, which we grade A+. Absorbing and learning Einstein is uniquely challenging. We try to help out by providing aids not included in the keepcase materials: an accurate libretto and a list of segments in the opera with correct Opus Arte time stamps. Good luck!

We have some other good grades with an A for the recent Met The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) and a B- for an earlier The Pearl Fishers from Naples. Also, we recently gave an A- for the new Don Quixote from the Vienna State Ballet.