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Mozart wrote La finta giardiniera in 1775 when he was 18 years old. It was his first staged buffo opera and centres on the lovers at the heart of the action, Sandrina – the pretend garden-girl of the title – and Belfiore. With few ensembles, Mozart channels his most intense and expressive music into arias which demonstrate a masterful ability to convey the full range of tenderness and passion. Originally staged at Glyndebourne in 2014 by Frederic Wake-Walker, this 2018 revival from La Scala is performed on period instruments with a strong cast and expertly conducted with exuberance and charm by Diego Fasolis.

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André Messager’s Fortunio premiered in 1907 at the Opéra Comique, where it received acclaim that was to last decades. One of the last composers to devote his entire career to opera and operetta, Messager exemplified in his music a feeling for dramatic pacing and the spirit of the Belle Époque, qualities that permeate Fortunio, a comédie lyrique in which the dialogue in the libretto is given a continuous musical setting. Taking Alfred de Musset’s play Le Chandelier as his source, Messager explores upper-class society at the turn of the 19th century with subtlety of characterization and a thoroughly French orchestral transparency. This production directed by Denis Podalydes features Cyrille Dubois in the title role, alongside soprano Anne-Catherine Gillet, and baritone Franck Leguerinel, among others.

Choreographer Jirí Bubenícek's Carmen celebrates the incredible inspiration of Bizet's timeless music in a completely new two-act ballet that also includes music by Albéniz, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Falla, orchestrated and adapted by Gabriele Bonolis. The production emphasizes aspects of the original drama, heightening the erotic atmosphere of the cigar factory and Carmen's wild spirit, and including a spectacular on-stage horse. The sensational choreography closely depicts the storyline of Prosper Mérimée's original novella in a production that was hailed by critics as a triumph. The Corpo di Ballo of the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma shines in this production, with Principal Dancers including Rebecca Bianchi in the role of Carmen, Amar Ramasar as Don Jose, and Alessio Rezza dancing the part of Lucas.

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Gluck’s influential Orphée et Eurydice tells the story of Orphée’s descent into the Underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice. His singing has the power to overcome the guardian Furies, but the path of true love is shadowed by sorrow and tragedy. As a true ‘drama of the soul’ with intense psychological and emotive power, Orphée et Eurydice shook enlightenment Europe to its core. Berlioz, in his 1859 version prepared for the Théâtre Lyrique, exploited the score’s full potential through a synthesis of the versions Gluck prepared for Parma, Paris and Vienna. Aurélien Bory’s Paris production was described as ‘just breathtaking’ by OperaJournal.

The Places:

The tour visits historic sites in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. These include the castles of Litomyšl and Konopišt? in Bohemia, and the historic town of M?lnik, the Horological Museum at Le Locle in Switzerland, relics of war from the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt, and a glimpse of the Belgian Château of Gaasbeek.

The Music:

The tour brings two of Joseph Haydn’s most famous symphonies, written for a London concert season in 1794, Symphony No. 100, the so-called Military Symphony, and Symphony No. 101, nicknamed The Clock.

Format: NTSC, 4:3
Audio: DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1, PCM Stereo 2.0
Region: 0 (All)

AUSTRIA

The Places
The places visited include Hohenwerfen Castle, the Weissensee, Styria, Linz, Aggstein, Hallein and Baden.

The Music
The music chosen for this tour of Austria consists of Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 5, written during his early adulthood in Salzburg.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo 2.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 56 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Like Mozart's, the two string quintets of Brahms are scored for two violins, two violas and cello. The choice is characteristic. The register of the violas and the richness of texture that such an instrumentation can impart, whether in chamber music or in orchestral writing, was very typical of Brahms, and reflected in his music for the piano. He had first attempted the form in 1862, using two cellos, as Schubert had done, but had destroyed it, replacing it first with an arrangement for two pianos, and later, in a final version, as a piano quintet. Brahms had intended his String Quintet in G major, Op. 111, as his last chamber music composition. He wrote it in the summer of 1890 at Bad Ischl, following his usual custom of composing during summer holidays spent away from the city. It was, in the event, to be followed by four further compositions, the Clarinet Trio, the Clarinet Quintet, and two Clarinet Sonatas, the last also known in an effectively autumnal version for viola, an instrument offered in the other works as an alternative to the clarinet. The G major Quintet was first performed in Vienna on 11th November in the year of it's composition. It starts with a movement derived from sketches for a fifth symphony, allowing the cello an orchestrally conceived first subject. For the second subject Brahms turns to Vienna for inspiration. There is a shift to B flat major in the central development, further modulation leading to the return of the original key and thematic material in recapitulation. The D minor slow movement allows free variations on the opening material, until the theme returns in a simpler form, originally played by the first viola. The third movement opens in a melancholy G minor, the feeling dispelled by a G major trio section, which has the last word, after the re-appearance of the G minor material. The quintet ends with a Vivace ma non troppo presto, a rondo that finds a place for much else that is thoroughly Austrian or Austro-Hungarian in mood, ending in an energetic Hungarian czárdás.

The scenes shown all breathe an air of peace and tranquility. Starting with an evening landscape in Bohemia we move to a lake in the Tyrol to the Museo Vela with it's gesso figures Bavarian craftsmen fashioning glass and the Corniche near Cannes in the South of France. Other scenes include the ancient Chapel of St Sixtus at Eygalieres the Church of St Jakob at Tramin night in Madrid and a nocturnal view of Seville the whole culminating in the great Basilica of St Mark in Venice.

GERMANY



The Places
The city of Nuremberg owes its importance partly to its geographical position, which made it a significant centre for trade. In spite of considerable damage, its old medieval city, now restored, remains as a monument to its importance in the late Middle Ages. By the 16th-century Nuremberg had become a centre of trade and of artistic activity. In art it could boast the presence of Albrecht Dürer and in poetry Hans Sachs and the Guild of Mastersingers, later to be celebrated by Wagner.
The Music
The son of Leopold Mozart, the Deputy Kapellmeister at the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had grown up at the archiepiscopal court, to be employed there, like his father, in a childhood and early adolescence interrupted by long concert tours as an infant prodigy. He excelled as a pianist, but was also a proficient violinist, and two of the three Violin Sonatas included here date from years in which he tried briefly to escape from Salzburg and find employment elsewhere, with the third written in 1781, when he was first establishing himself in independence in Vienna, where he was to die ten years later.



Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo 2.0 / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 53 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

The Places - the scenes shown are of the Benedictine Abbey and Church at Einsiedeln, in the Swiss canton of Schwyz. The monastery, in origin dating from the 10th century, was largely rebuilt in the 18th century to designs by Caspar Moosbrugger of Vorarlberg, a former lay brother in the community, and has long been an important centre of pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna, now in a black marble chapel built in the early 19th century. The impressive interior of the church contains frescos by Cosmas Damian Asam and stucco work by his brother Egid Quirin Asam. The Music - the tour is accompanied by the third and fourth of the four Orchestral Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach and a Concerto for oboe, violin and continuo by Antonio Vivaldi.

Naxos has released a second collection of Russian tenor arias by Vladimir Grishko. Like the first volume, we have a beautiful tenor voice treating us to some rarely heard arias from operas not often performed outside of Russia. Probably the only familiar pieces to non-Russian listeners would be the brief orchestral excerpts from Glinka's A Life For Tsar and Polovtsian March from Borodin's Prince Igor so listening is a treat in and of itself.

The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenthcentury German authors, early Romantics and Biedermeier poets.

The tour takes US first to the carnival celebrations in Basel, with it's elaborate displays. There follows a visit to Vigeland Park in Oslo, with it's characteristic figures, the work of Gustav Vigeland. The music chosen for this tour is by Schumann. His Carnaval accompanies the carnival in Basel, flowers in the countryside are depicted in Blumenstuck and the granite figures in Vigeland Park, in Oslo, are matched with Scenes of Childhood.