Product Overview
Monteverdi: L'Orfeo / Favola in musica in one prologue and five acts Libretto by Alessandro Striggio / Les Arts Florissants Conductor: William Christie / Recorded at Teatro Real, Madrid / Interviews with the interpreters by José Luis Pérez De Arteaga / DVD
Formats: NTSC
Run time: 113 Minutes
UPC: 8007144335984
- Aspect Ratio : 1.78:1
- MPAA rating : Unrated (Not Rated)
- Package Dimensions : 7.56 x 5.35 x 0.59 inches; 4.01 Ounces
- Director : Pier Luigi Pizzi, Matteo Ricchetti
- Media Format : NTSC, Subtitled
- Release date : June 30, 2009
- Actors : Antonio Abete, Dietrich Henschel, Luigi De Donato, Sonia Prina, Maria Grazia Schiavo
- Subtitles: : French, English, Italian, German, Spanish
- Language : Italian (Dolby Digital 5.1), Italian (PCM Stereo)
- Studio : Dynamic
- Number of discs : 1
Double layer disc: this feature may cause a minor pause at the layer changes
This is the third L’Orfeo I’ve seen on DVD, and it’s a real success. In style it fits among the theatrical productions that use over 20 singers and over 20 players, even adding some supernumeraries to fill the stage. Yet as a performance it should stand comparison with the intimate versions that we have heard on CD recently, since Pier Luigi Pizzi, the stage director who also designed the sets and costumes, replicated the venue of the first production in the Mantua residence. This may suggest that adhering to the minimal personnel of the alternative interpretation (a dozen singers and a dozen players, more or less) is not really necessary, or simply that Pizzi imagines a pretty big palace. But he imagines well, for this is the best stage set, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best camerawork of the three versions I’ve seen. It is simply the best theatrical production of an opera that I’ve ever seen on DVD (not that I’ve seen very many). All three were made in live performances (the Harnoncourt video of 1979 was pantomimed in a studio 10 months after the performance was recorded), but the audience manifests itself only twice at the ends of the two halves. Christie’s was a single performance of May 19, 2008, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, while Jean Claude Malgoire’s was made at Tourcoing in October 2004 (also for Dynamic) and Stephen Stubbs’s was made in Amsterdam in July 1997 for Opus Arte.
