Customer Rating: - Opposite Poles
Get this DVD and also the Julie Taymore "Oedipus Rex" and you have two opposite poles of the mind and music of Stravinsky as well as the power of filmed stage opera and opera just for film. The brutal, gritty live production on stage of "Oedipus" is how that should be done. The dreamy, FX, studio production of "Le Rossignol" is just how that should be done. The music in both cases is perfection. They are perfect foils.
Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex
The music of "Le Rossignol" is excruciatingly beautiful. The stylistic clash resulting from Stravinsky having put the opera down to go through the epiphany of "Firebird" to "Petruchka" and finally opening...no, blowing the door off and ushering in 20th century music with "Le Sacre du Printemps" is no hindrance, as is often said. It is used by the composer to set up the contrasts of the story. These contrasts of natural with the artificial are not ignored or forgotten by director Chaudet's flashy CGI as some have stated. After all the nightingale is the only real bird in the film....Natalie Dessay is also organic and real representing the bird and it's song. It should also not go unnoticed that the "earthy" characters, the cook and the fisherman, are also the only "real" beings. Practically everyone else is incased in something normally inanimate and man made. Cigarette smoking Death is real and organic (as it is outside of film, in our own world) too. Even the emperor must break out of his beautiful but man made prison to become real... literally morphing out of a boy's dream into reality.
This is a great interpretation. It will please those who know nothing of Stravinsky or opera as well as those who do. See it!
Customer Rating: - Great music,great visuals
The music is great and the visuals are fantastic. They blend human shots with imaginative animation well matched to the music. This is my favorite DVD.
Customer Rating: - NO NO NO!!!
I just got this dvd and have watched it from start to finish.
I am deeply dissappointed. I am giving it two stars because musically it is brilliant - but one could purchase a CD for that and not a DVD!!! The presentation is so artificial that it just disturbs the same main moral of this opera - that natural is best - overdoing it is just destroying it!
Very sad.
Customer Rating: - Very Surealistic
I have enjoyed the CD of this performance for years and I tried to watch it when it was shown on my local PBS station, but you can't be interrupted and you have to watch it from the beginning. When I saw that it was available on DVD (actually I looked for it after the last abortive attempt to watch it) I snapped it up. I finally got a chance to watch it last night and I was amazed. This performance is a bit difficult to understand and I would suggest that reading the Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tale first. The musical production is fantastic. I have always hoped that Natalie Dessay would dome to the San Francisco Opera and she finally is next season. The video production is magical and surreal. The bonus materials that I have watched so far are intriguing.
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Conlon Mikhailov, Naouri, Schagidullin, Grivnov, Urmana, McLaughlin, Dessay, Nightingale)/ (The Rossignol Le - Stravinsky Igor
- Opposite Poles
- NO NO NO!!!