Review, buy Classical: Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Lohengrin [1982], Yevgeny Kissin In Tokyo [1987], Carlo Curley-Organ Imperial, Steve Reich's City Life [1995], Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti In Concert [1990], Puccini Favourites [1989], Yevgeny Kissin In Tokyo [1987], The Vienna Boys' Choir - Vienna Boys' Choir Sing Mozart At The Chapel Of The Hofburg Vienna, Yehudi Menuhin - The Violin Of The Century [1996], Dream Of Gerontius, Tchaikovsky: Gala Tribute To Tchaikovsky [1993], UN 50th Anniversary Concert [1995], Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 Resurrection - London Symphony Orchestra, Yo Yo Ma - Bach Suite No. 5 - Struggle For Hope, Gwahoddiad - An Invitation, Ozawa conducts Strauss and Brahms at the Osaka Festival, 1986 [VINYL], Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra - Mahler: Symphony Nos. 1 And 4, Kyung Wha Chung-Beethoven Violin Co, James Galway At 50 [1991]

It's a common complaint that opera singers can't act, and actors can't sing opera. In this handsome 1988 film of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, director Petr Weigl attempts to solve the problem by letting each group of performers do what they do best. Thus the music is a studio recording with some great voices in the principal roles, and the film is a lip-synched performance shot in stunning locations by a good-looking cast of players. On the positive side this means that the whole thing looks gorgeous, and sun-drenched dachas, glittering ballrooms and snowy steppes are all captured with painterly verve. The musical performances are also splendid, with Bernd Weikl making a passionate, tortured Onegin, Teresa Kubiak a honeyed, fresh-sounding Tatyana, and Solti conducting with driven intensity. But realism and opera rarely make happy bed-fellows, and the down-side of this film is that the naturalistic "speaking-style" lip-synching and understated acting are entirely at odds with the grand musical gestures, and occasionally give rise to a somewhat absurd alienation effect. Thus while Kubiak's voice is at full blast, Magdalena Vasaryova looks like she's making polite chit-chat at a cocktail party. But the project feels like a brave experiment, nonetheless, and if the whole isn't quite the sum of its different elements, those elements are still jolly good. On the DVD: Eugene Onegin on disc has excellent picture quality (which is fortunate in such a visually exquisite film), though the sound is a little distant and muffled. The film starts with the entry of the peasants in Act 1, but the DVD includes the Prologue and music before this point as an audio bonus. [+]

There are subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese, and a series of trailers for other Decca DVDs. -Warwick Thompson.

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Review Decca / UN 50th Anniversary Concert [1995]

UN 50th Anniversary Concert [1995] (Decca)

Actors & Directors

The World Orchestra For Peace
Georg Solti

Release date: 1996-01-02
Run time: 81 min.
Price: £12.99

Review UN 50th Anniversary Concert [1995] / Decca:

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Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 Resurrection - London Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)

Actors & Directors

Leonard Bernstein

Run time: 92 min.
Price: £14.99

Review Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 Resurrection - London Symphony Orchestra / Deutsche Grammophon:

From its stunning opening sequence, featuring Georgina Hale (who plays the wife of Gustav Mahler in this Ken Russell film) isolated in full mummy wrap and writhing with erotic yearning to the lush strains of her husband's music, Mahler distinguishes itself as the most poetic and archetypal of Russell's great-composer works. A kind of cinematic response to Luchino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a Mahler-esque composer in search of beauty in the plague-filled city, Mahler stars Robert Powell as the great Jewish romantic from 19th-century Vienna, drafting enormous symphonic works in the midst of rising anti-Semitism. Converting to Christianity as a means of survival, Mahler carries on with his work but experiences an erosion of his health and sense of identity. Meanwhile, his self-effacing spouse represses her own creative drives to keep the resident genius afloat, plugging every leak and receding all but invisible into the woodwork. While the film is the least ostentatious of Russell's movies about music, it is hardly conventional-a mix of lyrical tableaux and comic fantasy that adds up to a stirring, dream-like experience. -Tom Keogh.

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