Overview: Wolf-Ferrari’s comic opera La vedova scaltra (The Cunning Widow), is among the works he based on plays by Goldoni. It matches closely the conventions of 18th-century opera buffa in its witty if sceptical look at the mechanisms governing the interplay of human relations. Four hopeful suitors, English, French, Spanish and Italian, vie for the hand of Rosaura, the cunning widow of the title, who disguises herself to meet each wooer, eventually choosing the only one who can demonstrate his sincerity. This production, filmed live at the Teatro La Fenice in February 2007 in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Goldoni in Venice in 1707, is the first to appear on DVD.

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Overview: To save his protegé from a fatal destiny, a magician has imprisoned knights and ladies in an enchanted labyrinthine palace and mystifies them to the point of delirium. Luigi Rossi's first opera - boasting sixteen soloists, double and triple choirs for 6 and 12 voices, numerous ballets - marked the last surge of Roman opera before the Eternal City forsook it for a long time. For the Argentine conductor Leonardo García Alarcón, who rediscovered the opera in the Vatican Library neglected for 380 years, Il palazzo incantato is ‘the missing link in the history of opera and the metaphor of our lives'. ‘Leonardo Garcia Alarcon was known as a magician, now he has become a conjurer.’ (Le Monde)

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Overview: In March 2024, to mark the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion, premiered in Leipzig in 1724, Berlin-born Sasha Waltz presented a movingly intense choreographed version on the stage of the Opéra de Dijon.

Genres: Music