Movies: Opera

Based on Shakespeare's play, Verdi's opera depicts the devastating effects of jealousy, "...the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds upon". Believing Otello has promoted the fast-rising Cassio over himself, Iago plots to destroy both ...

Alessandro Corbelli takes the title role in Annabel Arden's whirlwind production of Puccini's compact opera, in which the scheming Gianni Schicchi retrieves for himself the spoils of a disinherited family to pave the way for his daughter to marry her...

The incomparable Plácido Domingo began a new chapter in his legendary Met career when he created the role of Emperor Qin in the world premiere of Tan Dun’s epic opera. Staged by revered film director Zhang Yimou, The First Emperor is both a rich page...

Imbuing the familiar Don Juan myth with a captivating combination of comedy, seductiveness, danger, and damnation, Mozart created an enduring masterpiece that has been a cornerstone of the repertory since its 1787 premiere. An early entry in the Met’...

Jeanne's beautiful breasts spill out from her torn clothes, and her gouged internal organs lie beneath. The contrast between death and eroticism is captured in a profound image. The opera that unfolds in the underground ward comes to a powerful catas...

At the English National Opera, Deborah Warner has been directing Benjamin Britten's final opera, Death in Venice, conducted by Edward Gardner....

Ghiaurov, Freni, and Bumbry were great voices in their time, and they are still effective here -- good enough musicians to put over the quite heavy vocal and expressive demands of their roles. Louis Quilico was never quite in that league, and he soun...

There are elements of Eurotrash in this outdoor Aix-en-Provence summer opera production. Nevertheless, the splendid singing and acting transform the story, normally treated as farce, into something considerably more serious. As many other critics hav...

The Lyric Opera of Chicago's 1985 production of Puccini's opera, set in the late nineteenth century in the city of Nagasaki, about a young Japanese woman who weds an American naval officer who later abandons her and the child she bore him....

A live recording of Carl Orff's world-famous musical masterpiece Carmina Burana, performed by more than 100 singers and dancers of the National Opera and Ballet of Ukraine (Odessa)....

Isabella is a strong, independent woman who has no intention of giving in to the clumsy advances of the powerful Mustafà. In the production by BAFTA winners Mosh Leiser and Patrice Caurier, which plays with prejudices about clashing cultures, Mustafà...

Claudio Monteverdi's operatic adaptation of this story from Homer's The Odyssey receives a modern and distinctive staging in this 2002 production directed by Humphrey Burton for Les Arts Florissants. Penelope Marijana Mijanovic is left to her own dev...

Giacomo Puccini's immortal opera, in a high budget feature-film version directed by Academy Award nominee Robert Dornhelm, stars opera's 'Golden Couple', Rolando Villazon and Anna Netrebko as the protagonists, Rodolfo and Mimi. The chemistry between ...

This occasionally off-the-wall but finely sung and colourfully staged La Cenerentola was Rome Opera’s first foray into the media market, shown on television and in cinemas across Italy in 2016. It clearly had the funding. Emma Dante’s production will...

Spain 1820. It's meal time at the cigar factory. Carmen spends her break in the square. Close by is Don José cleaning his weapons....

As renowned for its harmonious overture as for its romantic storybook characters, this three-act masterwork features some of the composer’s most groundbreaking and unforgettable music, as well as a theme the young Wagner would revisit again and again...

In a grimy provincial industrial city, a talented but unattractive schoolteacher dreams of an operatic career....

Richard Wagner called Die Walküre the “first evening” of the Ring of the Nibelung; he called Das Rheingold the prologue or Vorabend. Musically and dramatically, we are introduced to a radically new and different world when the opening bars of Die Wal...

Carlos Álvarez takes the title role in the first of Verdi's Shakespearean operas, with Maria Guleghina as the manipulative wife whose desire to gain the Scottish throne drives her husband to murder and leaves both with blood on their hands. Bruno Ca...

Australian Opera Chorus and Elizabethan Sydney Orchestra production of Donizetti's opera...