The Rape of Lucretia

Britten The Rape of Lucretia opera to libretto by the Ronald Duncan. Directed 2015 by Fiona Shaw at Glyndebourne. Stars Christine Rice (Lucretia), Allan Clayton (Male Chorus), Kate Royal (Female Chorus), Duncan Rock (Tarquinius), Matthew Rose (Collatinus), Michael Sumuel (Junius), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Bianca), and Louise Alder (Lucia). Leo Hussain conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Leader Pieter Schoeman). Set design by Michael Levine; costume design by Nicky Gillibrand; lighting design by Paul Anderson. Directed for TV by François Roussillon; produced by George Bruell. Sung in English. Released 2016, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA

This got "First Runner-Up" award for best opera record of 2017 in the annual Gramophone 2017 Awards issue.

Here's a good clip:

Seventy years after its Glyndebourne world premiere, Benjamin Britten's first chamber opera is welcomed home with 'a performance of enthralling emotional power and physical beauty' gifted with 'piercingly intelligent, immaculately realised staging and superb singing, acting and playing' led by 'Fiona Shaw's supremely nuanced direction' and underpinned by 'febrile playing' from members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (The Telegraph ★★★★★).

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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.