Product Details

• Actors: Hervé Niquet, Joăo Fernandes, Marc Mauillon, Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Mathias Vidal
• Directors: Corinne & Gilles Benizio, Shirley & Dino, Olivier Simonnet
• Writers: Shirley & Dino, Henry Purcell, John Dryden
• Producers: Le Concert Spirituel
• Format: Classical, DTS Surround Sound, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Subtitles: French, German, Spanish, English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Glossa
• DVD Release Date: December 8, 2009
• Run Time: 112 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002Y4Z5D2
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #248,669 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars King Arthur bombs again, January 15, 2010

By 

Bill E. "operanut" (Rockville Centre, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: King Arthur, semi-opera by Henry Purcell (Opéra National de Montpellier 2009) (DVD)

This is the 2nd DVD of Purcell's King Arthur which I've purchased and the 2nd which I'm sorry I did. The first is a Vienna production conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and directed by Jurgen Flimm. The sung portions are in English, but the spoken parts are in German. At least you can filter out the spoken portions and hear the music without them.

This latest purchase is a French production with sung portions in highly French-accented English and spoken portions in French. The nonmusic portions in this production are a joke, but a not funny one. They make no sense at all and have no relationship to the opera other than "entertaining" the audience. (They did not entertain this audience member!)

The orchestra is conducted by Herve Niquet, who comes on stage during an interlude (scene change) to sing some popular song from the White Horse Inn(?). Once the curtain comes up on a "forest" scene, the audience gets involved in making it more authentic when they are asked to provide forest noises.

The whole mess is a waste of time and money.

My advice - stick to the sound only recordings.

Too bad that I can't get my money back on both DVDs So much for purchasing anything before it's released and reviewed.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Celtic past of the English is a farce, June 28, 2010

By 

Jacques COULARDEAU "A soul doctor, so to say" (OLLIERGUES France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: King Arthur, semi-opera by Henry Purcell (Opéra National de Montpellier 2009) (DVD)

King Arthur is a crazy rewriting of English history after the English revolutions to give some kind of a national identity to that United Kingdom that was nothing but the result of successive invasions and constant European strife. Just that is funny today, but that is Dryden's play and we will be deprived of it. We'll just have the musical intermezzi by Henry Purcell. This composer is the typical and main composer of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. The theaters were reopened and censorship was going down quite a lot. They will even invent the copyright a couple of decades later. But the play and the subject were not funny at the time. It was dead serious and no one was supposed to laugh at this new version of English history. The Celtic past of England is laughable when we know they were once and for all dominated and colonized by Julius Caesar and that will not change with the invasions of the Angles, the Jutes and the Saxons, and "marginally" the Danes, and of course not with the invasion of the Normans. The Celtic language will only survive in the Welsh mountains. To evoke the Bretons as the ancestors of the modern Britishers is a fable and a farce. But to that very long play by Dryden, that so serious subject at the time, Henry Purcell gave some dynamism and some fun. The musical interludes and intermezzi are first of all distractions, entertainments. Niquet with the help of two buffoons, I was going to write baboons, Corinne and Gilles Benizio, turns those musical pieces into a real farce by reinventing some kind of funny dramatic line among them, and the line is what happens to a poor stage manager when he is invaded by a band of lurid en lubricious singers. A few extras are added in front of the curtain just for our pleasure. Niquet goes one iota further by turning the musical pieces into some kind of big feast, more of an orgy actually with two perverted monks and a barbecue. This production is a farce and wants to be a farce. That does not serve the music by Purcell badly, wrongly or well. Purcell's music can be served with any sauce you want, it remains Purcell's music but it makes the whole show so much more like what it probably was: a celebration of dramatic freedom and of dramatic entertainment in those troubled years of the end of the 17th century, after they had nearly been re-colonized by the French of Louis XIV. They will remain Germanic, or Anglo-Saxon if you prefer, for ever. Enjoy the farce. Enjoy the music. Enjoy the show and don't forget the show must go on... go on living not being a putrefied and petrified baroque classic, which it is by the way, but let us de-petrify that composer a little. The question is to know whether Niquet went too far. For me he had a black-out moment at the right time though it would have been funny to see King Arthur in his underwear or even in his under-underwear. But well, I guess the opera in Montpellier is not the Moulin Rouge.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID