Product Overview
Donizetti: Roberto Devereux / Opera in Three Acts / Music by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) Libretto by Salvatore Cammarano (1801-1852) / Filene Center Orchestra & Wolf Trap Company Chorus / Julius Rudel, conductor / Live Performance, 1975 / DVD
Format: NTSC
Run time: 145 Minutes
UPC:
- Aspect Ratio : 1.33:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : Yes
- MPAA rating : Unrated (Not Rated)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.89 Ounces
- Director : Kirk Browning
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, NTSC, Color, Classical
- Run time : 2 hours and 25 minutes
- Release date : June 26, 2001
- Actors : Beverly Sills, John Alexander, Richard Fredricks, John Lankston, Susanne Marsee
- Dubbed: : Italian
- Subtitles: : English
- Language : Italian (PCM Stereo)
- Studio : Video Artists Int'L
- Writers : Salvatore Cammarano
- Number of discs : 1
Roberto Devereux, the last and probably the greatest opera Gaetano Donizetti composed for the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, is based on the intense, tangled relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, who was beheaded for treason in 1601. The role of the queen is one of the strongest in the bel canto soprano repertoire. In this video (essentially a New York City Opera production transplanted to the Filene Center at Wolf Trap performing arts center outside Washington, D.C.), Beverly Sills gives one of the great performances of her career. She had been singing the role in New York for several years, to great critical acclaim, and had made it her own, though her voice was beginning to lose some of its freshness when this performance was filmed in 1974. In discussing the soprano stars of bel canto opera, we find a 180-degree polarity--at one extreme, the dramatic potency and vocal problems of Maria Callas; at the other, the vocal agility and smoothness of the dramatically unconvincing Joan Sutherland. Midway between these extremes is Sills, who acted almost as well as Callas, sang almost as beautifully as Sutherland, and balanced the two sides of her art more effectively than either.
