Cursive II is a masterpiece by Lin Hwai-min, choreographer of the highly acclaimed Moon Water and Bamboo Dream. Inspired by the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy, this work is both commanding and seductive. The superb Cloud Gate (Taïwan) dancers, trained in meditation, Chi-Kung and martial arts, touch you with original movements, fierce as striking thunder or soft as flowing ink on rice paper. The complexity of energy is further enhanced by the music of John Cage, while the blown-up images of ‘ice crackles’ from Sung porcelain shimmer with delicate beauty. This production exquisitely filmed by dance expert Ross MacGibbon captures the meditative aura of the dance. It excites. It mesmerizes. You can never turn away an eye for one second.

Gidon Kremer notes: "Time passes, whether that of the creator or of the servant, while the black dots and strokes are caught by ink and paper stay forever. Ages before our Internet era these little symbols carried gigabytes of information, but unlike what we can download today, they were always full of spiritual value. We question them and they continue to tell us something, while at the same time questioning us all."

Gidon Kremer releases his first performances of these works in almost a quarter of a century, recorded at the Pfarrkirche Lockenhaus, March and September 2002. Also included is a Kremer documentary with Tatjana Grindenko, Glenn Gould, Sir Simon Rattle, Kremerata Baltica, Berlin Philharmonic, Sofia Gubidulina, Jacques Brel, and more.

Mireille est un opéra en cinq actes, composé par Charles Gounod sur un livret de Michel Carré d'après Mirèio, poème épique en provençal de Frédéric Mistral, créé le 19 mars 1864 au Théâtre Lyrique.

The late Mehta once called SADKO the most beautiful opera ever written. He was probably right as the opera is a hymn to the sea, love, adventure and romance. It is saturated with the most gorgeous music. The immortal Song of India is just the crowning jewel in this rich tapestry.

We are magically transported from the ancient city of Novgorod to an enchanted lake to a kingdom under seas and back again to Novgorod. Visually, this must be the most gorgeous opera, now available on DVD. Forget television, the latest news and the chores of today for three hours of enjoyment and fantasy.

The second volume of the collection dedicated this time to three opera genres: the Qin Ping and Yun Operas, with poetic names such as: Western chamber Beating the Maid-Servant or Legend of the White Snake : The Ruined Bridge.

An alienated 15 year old, forced to move away from his friends in London when his family relocates to rural Devon, struggles with the change and becomes an observer of the family. His mother is pregnant, his dad is vocally abusive, and his 18 year old sister is sexually active and open to her brother. However, the boy guesses at and finds that he is correct that his father has had sexual relations with his sister. The boy gets a sexual education from an older woman he meets.
Pour Tom et ses quinze ans, la zone de guerre se trouve au coeur même de sa famille. Ni pauvre ni riche, apparemment heureuse. Lorsque la famille quitte Londres pour la campagne du Devon, Tom se trouve confronté à la solitude et à l'ennui. Mais rien ne peut le préparer à la decouverte du secret qui lie son père, Dad, à sa soeur, Jessie, âgée de dix-huit ans.

Tom Cairns' cinematic film, made in 2001, presents Bernstein's short opera set in 1950s America with dramatic direction and wonderful sets. Leonard Bernstein's satire on American suburban married life stars Stephanie Novacek as Dinah and Karl Daymond as Sam facing a serious marital breakdown, from which the latest movie release Trouble in Tahiti seems the only escape. Inspired by jazz and American musical comedy, the score is a path-breaking fusion of lyric art with popular entertainment.

Iphigénie en Tauride (Iphigeneia in Tauris) is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck in four acts. It was his fifth opera for the French stage. The libretto was written by Nicolas-François Guillard.
With Iphigénie, Gluck took his operatic reform to its logical conclusion. The recitatives are shorter and they are récitatif accompagné (ie. the strings and perhaps other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment). The normal dance movements that one finds in the French Tragédie are almost entirely absent. The drama is based on the play Iphigeneia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which deals with Greek mythological stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
The borrowings Gluck made in this, his last significant opera, are numerous, and many scholars feel that they constitute a "summing up" of the artistic ideals he pursued throughout his career as a composer. Most of the reused music is his own, culled from his earlier, Italian-language operas or from his ballet Semiramis (1765). The Act II music for the Furies, for example, adapts music from Gluck's ballet. In at least one case, however, an aria in Iphigénie en Tauride is actually Gluck borrowing from himself borrowing from Johann Sebastian Bach; the Act IV number for Iphigenia, "Je t'implore et je tremble," is a parody of "Perchè, se tanti siete" from Gluck's Antigono, which in turn uses material from the Gigue of the Partita no. 1 in B Flat (BWV 825) by Bach.

This beloved operetta, which takes place during Carnival celebrations in 18th-century in Venice, shows Strauss’s descriptive writing at its best, helped by his love of Italy. The stellar cast includes such eminent singer as Anton de Ridder, Sylvia Geszty, Julia Migenes and Trudeliese Schmiedt; Kurt Eichhorn conducts the Münchner Rundfunkorchester.

Ce petit CD produit par China Records est probablement une commande gouvernementale, le livret spartiate témoignant des temps d'une Chine encore désargentée et timide, qui voulait faire connaître aux occidentaux ses différents arts. Donc comme son nom l'indique, il s'agit d'un CD qui veut introduire l'auditeur à l'art de l'opéra chinois. Dans ce premier volet, c'est l'opéra Kun et Sichuan qui sont à l'honneur au travers de quelques airs célèbres.

Les Indes galantes est le premier des six opéra-ballets de Jean-Philippe Rameau. Il est composé d'un prologue et de quatre entrées, sur un livret de Louis Fuzelier. Cette œuvre est généralement considérée comme la plus représentative du genre de l'opéra-ballet. Le genre avait été inventé par André Campra (l'Europe galante) et Rameau, malgré la pauvreté et les invraisemblances du livret, le porte à son apogée grâce à une musique admirable qui lui assura de très nombreuses représentations au cours du XVIIIe siècle. Alors que Campra racontait des histoires galantes dans différents pays européens, Rameau exploite la même veine à succès mais recherche un peu plus d’exotisme dans des Indes très approximatives qui se trouvent en fait en Turquie, en Perse, au Pérou ou chez les Indiens d’Amérique du Nord. L’intrigue ténue de ces petits drames sert surtout à introduire un « grand spectacle » où les costumes somptueux, les décors, les machineries, et surtout la danse tiennent un rôle essentiel. Les Indes Galantes symbolisent l’époque insouciante, raffinée, vouée aux plaisirs et à la galanterie de Louis XV et de sa cour.
Une grandiose ouverture à la française commence l’œuvre, dans la tradition lullyste (début solennel en notes pointées, intermède fugué plus rapide, retour à la mélodie initiale).

The Trocks are a treasure that every ballet lover should see at least once live. If you know and love ballet, you'll howl with laughter at the witty parody-on-pointe that these remarkable men do. If you know nothing about ballet, you will howl with laughter at their comedic turns. If I were to be stuck with only five ballet DVDs ever, two of them would be the Trocks disks.

This is one of the most important recordings of the 20th century, both for its content (considered by many the greatest cello music of all time) and for the intense devotion, careful preparation, and towering technical skill that went into the project. It was a brilliant idea to make a video as well as an audio recording. Cellists will welcome the chance to study Rostropovich's bowing and fingering techniques, close up and at leisure. And music-lovers will welcome the visuals of the recording location, a French church whose architecture, statues, and flickering candles complement the music.

Ce DVD vous emmène dans le Tassili N'Ajjer en compagnie du violoncelliste Dominique de Williencourt. Les notes du violoncelle communient avec le silence et les dunes... Un lieu magique aux contrées infinies. Des lieux insolites offrant une résonnance particulière. Dominique de Williencourt s'arrête et joue, avec le désir de se retrouver, comme sur une scène, face aux Suites de Bach. Suites n°1 et n°5

The First Emperor is one of those spectacular MET stagings, bursting with colorful costumes and striking sets in noted film director Zhang Yimou’s production. It’s been billed as a "global opera" in its mixture of traditional Chinese and Western music written by Tan Dun, who has successfully bridged the two in his compositions, perhaps most effectively in his film music. The opera’s based on supposed incidents in the life of Qin Shi Huang, whose military conquests unified China in 221 BC. He’s credited with building a centralized state, constructing the Great Wall, codifying the laws, and standardizing weights and measures. His efficiency also extended to ruthlessly suppressing dissent and murdering scholars, which could indicate a subtext that makes him a stand-in for Mao Zedong. The libretto, by the composer and Ha Jin, largely conforms to Western epic opera traditions, revolving around the tribulations of an ambitious power-seeker, his daughter’s love for the composer Jianli, and the Emperor’s desire for her to marry a general for political reasons. The bloody ending involves the death of the three members of the love triangle and the Emperor’s ascension to the throne where he hears the anthem composed for the occasion by Jianli, which turns out to be the song of the slaves building the Great Wall.