Raimondi, Ruggero

Verdi: Ernani (1983)

Donizetti - Don Pasquale

This 2006 Zurich Opera production of Donizetti's popular Don Pasquale captures not only the opera's high-spirited comedy but also its underlying cruelty. Featuring veteran bass-baritone Ruggerio Raimondi in the title role and a fine supporting cast, this DVD has what no other version of the opera has--tenor Juan Diego Flórez as the Don's nephew, the lovelorn Ernesto--and his brilliant portrayal makes this a must-see for any admirer of great singing.

The basic plot of the opera is a time-worn comedy staple: the foolish old man who seeks a young wife. The Don's doctor and advisor, Dr. Malatesta, hatches a scheme to trick the old man into a fake marriage with Norina, a young widow in love with Malatesta's friend, the Don's nephew, Ernesto. She's presented to the Don as the Doctor's sister, fresh from the convent school, whose demure demeanor captivates the victim who immediately agrees to the "marriage." Once that's accomplished, she turns into a spendthrift shrew who drives the Don to the brink of suicide. Ernesto, plunged into despair when he thinks his beloved abandoned him for his uncle, is finally brought into the scheme and plays his part in the trick. All ends well when the Don realizes his foolishness, blesses the young couple's union and agrees to a handsome annual allowance for them.

Flórez will make you forget other tenors who have sung Ernesto. His voice is sweet and tender but with a touch of steel in its upper range, adding excitement as when he ends a heavily ornamented passage with a ringing top D-flat. His pianissimos are ravishing and his last-act aria, Com'è gentil is radiant. Raimondi, drier of voice than in his younger days, is a fine Don Pasquale, acting with comic brio, breaking into dances of joy when his proposal seems to be working, and plunging into comedy-tinged despair when it turns sour. As Dr. Malatesta, baritone Oliver Widmer is appropriately slimy. Norina is Spanish soprano Isabel Rey, who delivers an accomplished vocal and acting performance, handling her coloratura turns with aplomb and acting with brio. Nello Santi conducts with appropriate Donizettian energy.

Stage director Grischa Asagoroff and designer Luigi Perego move the setting from the mid-19th century to the 1920s, so Ernesto enters in a tennis outfit, Don Pasquale's clothes include a broadly striped double-breasted white suit with spats, and the Don's drawing room changes from stuffy old-fashioned décor to a garish pink-dominated horror after Norina takes charge. The Don's prime activity when not fulminating about his nephew or donning a tawdry wig to woo Norina is caressing his collection of teddy bears. But his pain is all too evident after the transformed Norina slaps him and the inescapable undercurrent of cruelty is fully brought out, making the last act reversals less convincing. TV director Felix Breisach's cameras efficiently convey the stage action, though the many close-ups make it obvious that Ernesto's beloved is old enough to be his mother. But Flórez's vocalism alone is enough to make this the preferred Don Pasquale. --Dan Davis

Rossini - Il Barbiere Di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville)

â€Â¢ Acclaimed tenor, Juan Diego Flórez in one of his greatest stage roles.

â€Â¢ Two disc set of the critically praised new production from Madrid’s Teatro Real.

â€Â¢ A top international cast including soprano María Bayo and the great bass baritone Ruggiero Raimondi.

â€Â¢ Includes a bonus disc featuring a fascinating look into the creation of Rossini's comic masterpiece.

Cast List
María Bayo (Rosina)
Juan Diego Flórez (Count Almaviva)
Pietro Spagnoli (Figaro)
Bruno Praticò (Doctor Bartolo)
Ruggiero Raimondi (Don Basilio)
Marco Moncloa (Fiorello)
Susana Cordón (Berta)
Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real, Madrid
Gianluigi Gelmetti, conductor
Directed by Emilio Sagi

Mozart - Don Giovanni / Maazel, Raimondi, Te Kanawa, Paris Opera

Set in Seville in the 1600s, young nobleman Don Giovanni is a well-known philanderer with a long list of amorous conquests. After he attempts to seduce the beautiful Donna Anna, her father's battle to protect her ends in tragedy. A film version of Mozart's greatest opera, directed by Joseph Losey (The Servant), with music direction by Lorin Maazel. 177 minutes. Cast:

Ruggero Raimondi: Don Giovanni
John Macurdy: The Commendatore
Edda Moser: Donna Anna
Kiri Te Kanawa: Donna Elvira
Kenneth Riegel: Don Ottavio
José van Dam: Leporello
Teresa Berganza: Zerlina
Malcolm King: Masetto
Eric Adjani: A Valet in Black

Donizetti - La Favorita

Puccini - Tosca / Gheorghiu, Alagna, Raimondi, Muraro, Cangelosi, Pappano, Royal Opera (2000 film)

Benoit Jacquot's filmed Tosca treads a fine line between operatic staginess and cinematic contrivance. As per the libretto, each act takes place in a single setting, but with the singers here miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack. Jacquot freely reminds us of the conceit with cutaways to the recording session itself--revealing conductor, orchestra, and soloists at work--thus a bridge is made between the on-screen action and the music-making itself, and the inherent duality of any opera production is laid refreshingly bare. The same cannot be said for the director's decision to interpolate spoken dialogue over the music in key places--a distraction, not an enhancement.

Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna are glamorous and attractive enough to make the most of their Hollywood-style close-ups; their singing easily bears similar close scrutiny--as anyone who owns the CD soundtrack album will surely already know. If Alagna lacks a little power as Cavaradossi on record, his charismatic screen presence happily compensates; while Gheorghiu is both vocally and physically almost ideal as Tosca. Ruggero Raimondi's Scarpia completes an outstanding trio; and in the pit (or, rather, in the studio) conductor Antonio Pappano handles the drama of Puccini's score without missing a single nuance. Both musically and visually, then, this is a Tosca to treasure. --Mark Walker

Tosca: A Film by Benoit Jacquot, after the libretto of Puccini's Opera. With Angela Gheorghiu as Floria Tosca, Roberto Alagna as Mario Cavaradossi, Ruggiero Raimondi as Baron Scarpia. Conducted by Antonio Pappano with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. How often has it been said that opera can't be translated into film? That the camera lens accentuates an opera's artificiality and turns the protagonists into caricatures? Benoît Jacquot's masterfully inventive two-hour Tosca, will change the minds of the most diehard opera buffs and win over newcomers to the art. What's even more astounding is that this is Jacquot's first venture into opera. Yet, that may be just the point. What makes his film so compellingly audacious is that from the very start he juxtaposes black-and-white scenes of the conductor, Antonio Pappano, and the actor/singers in the recording studio with the staged opera in order to reveal the energy and work that goes into realizing a mighty work of lyrical art and ensemble acting. At other times, he uses soft-focus and grainy black-and-white and color footage of the Roman countryside, the Castel Sant' Angelo and the interiors of Baroque churches to illustrate what the actors are singing off-screen. These scenes add immeasurably to the opera's enthralling lyricism. Giacomo Puccini's music and Guiseppe Giacosa's libretto are mesmerizing and unforgettable, both enhanced by the director's focus on the drama between the three main protagonists: Floria Tosca (played by the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu), her lover, the painter and political radical Mario Cavaradossi (played movingly by Roberto Alagna, Gheorghiu's off-screen husband) and the vilely magnetic Il Barone Scarpia, the fascistic Roman governor (Ruggero Raimondi). From the opening credits of red typeface on black ground, to the surprising black-and-white filming of the conductor guiding the cast with his baton through the opera's overture and first arias, to the first act in the church, the movie embraces Tosca as a drama of unbridled passions. Through the astute use of hovering overhead shots and swirling camera angles, the film projects and intensifies the emotional upheaval of the three protagonists--the possessively jealous Tosca, the tender and placating Cavaradossi who assures her she has no rivals, and the terrifying Scarpia, determined to capture the Italian fugitive Angelotti (Maurizio Murano). Jacquot demonstrates here how film can strengthen the opera's drama—the silence of the protagonists, their tortured faces, the intensity of their love, their hate, and their fear. In the second act, which takes place in the Palazzo Farnese, the dramatic interplay between Tosca and Scarpia is spellbinding. Scarpia, dining in a darkened room lit only by a roaring fire and candlelight, plots his seduction of Tosca while admiring his contorted face in the gleaming blade of the knife that he also uses to cut a bloody piece of meat. The knife is appropriately prophetic since it is the very blade with which Tosca will kill him later in the scene. Dressed in a dazzling red gown with a sweeping train, Tosca is a stunning contrast to the dark Scarpia. Her fiery sexuality understandably motivates Scarpia's temptation as it leads to his final (albeit well-deserved) doom. The finale on the rooftop of Castel Sant' Angelo has cumulative power, with Tosca leaping off the parapet into the black void after she realizes that Cavaradossi has been shot with real bullets, instead of the promised blanks. Jacquot has filmed the opera exactly as the libretto directs, ideally capturing its drama and lyricism. Even with Tosca's violent ending, Puccini's great art provides catharsis, a transporting emotional release that soars after the deeply felt power of the tragedy. Rachel Hunter

Life Is a Bed of Roses (La Vie Est Un Roman) (1983)

Alain Resnais pays tribute to three influential French filmmakers Georges Melies, Marcel L Herbier and Eric Rohmer with this lighthearted film about happiness and the power of the imagination. Life Is a Bed of Roses is divided into three parallel narratives. The first section is set around the first decade of the twentieth century in the Ardennes, where Count Forbeck (Ruggero Raimondi) unveils his architect s designs for a utopian city. In a modern day mirroring of this story, a group of professors now inhabiting Forbeck s castle seek a new form of education through the use of the imagination, under the guidance of a guru named Guarini (Vittorio Gassman Big Deal on Madonna Street, Sharky s Machine). The third segment depicts a Wagnerian fantasy landscape of kings and dragons, which arises from the imagination of the children of some of the professors at the school. With ingenuity and great craftsmanship, Resnais weaves together these three threads to make Life Is a Bed of Roses a compelling and entertaining mixture of drama, satire, comedy, fantasy and music.

Bizet - Carmen / Maazel, Migenes, Domingo

This is the most popular opera production so far on DVD, surpassing even Franco Zeffirelli's lavish, symbol-laden La Traviata. It is an exciting Carmen, with a young-looking Placido Domingo in top form for a role he has sung hundreds of times. For Julia Migenes, it was her first performance in a role she would have trouble performing in an opera house. Her voice does not fit easily into Carmen's range, and she spent months training it, very successfully, before singing the role in a recording studio where the soundtrack was taped before the film was shot. Casting her in the role was a gamble, but it worked; she is a convincing actress--even better than Maria Ewing in the competing DVD edition from Covent Garden, though Ewing acts very well and has a more appropriate voice.

This movie version was filmed on location, conveying a kind of atmosphere, a sense of space, movement, and presence hard to achieve in a staged performance shot for television. It takes the action out of doors for many scenes. The opening titles are superimposed on the bloody conclusion of a bullfight. The changing of the guard in the opening scene, with the boys' chorus playing soldier, the crowd scenes, the dance number that opens Act II, the panoramic scenery of the smugglers' mountain hideout, all benefit from the freedom granted by movie cameras. But the music is, on the whole, more effectively performed in the Covent Garden production, which also handles close-up shots better, perhaps because it was directed with a small screen in mind. The opera house atmosphere will make hard-core opera fans feel more at home. The movie version uses the opera's original opera comique form with some spoken dialogue rather than recitatives. --Joe McLellan

All the passion and spectacle of Bizet's Carmen comes to life in this dazzling screen opera starring Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson. In 19th century Seville, the lusty, tempestuous Carmen (Migenes-Johnson) seduces a naive Army corporal, Don Jose (Domingo), newly assigned to the village fortress. Jose abandons his career, his fiancée and even his dying mother for the love of this sultry gypsy. But soon she spurns him in favor of a toreador, Escamillo (Ruggero Raimondi). Crazed with jealousy, Jose begs Carmen to return to him, but her taunting declaration of independence results in tragedy. Shot entirely on location in Andalusian Spain, Bizet's Carmen has been hailed as the definitive version of this classic opera. 155 minutes.

Rossini - Il Turco in Italia / Bartoli, Raimondi, Macias, Rumetz, Schmid, Welser-Most, Zurich Opera

Gounod - Faust