Product Details

• Actors: Anna Caterina Antonacci, Giovanni Battista Parodi, Cinzia Forte, Sara Mingardo, Giuseppe Filianoti
• Format: Classical, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: Italian
• Subtitles: English, French, Italian, Spanish
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Hardy Classics DVD
• DVD Release Date: June 2, 2009
• Run Time: 136 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B002011WYK
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #112,923 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Negletto, July 30, 2009

By 

Todd Kay - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Cherubini: Medea (DVD)

Although highly esteemed by Classical and Romantic composers such as Beethoven and Brahms (the latter's summing-up: "what we musicians recognize as the height of dramatic music"), Cherubini's setting of Euripides, first heard in 1797 in French, all but vanished over the course of the 19th century. Today it would be as obscure as the Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier's operatic treatment of the same material were it not for the title role's emergence in the 1950s as one of Maria Callas's signature roles. The finest of her Giasones, Jon Vickers, averred that Cherubini's vengeful sorceress, not Bellini's Norma or Verdi's Violetta, was Callas's greatest portrayal. In the post-Callas period, the work again became a rarity, although it did receive one commercial recording per decade in the 1960s and 1970s, both sets conducted by Lamberto Gardelli. Gwyneth Jones and Sylvia Sass, respectively, coped with the title role.

The opera's neglect, especially in the theater, is puzzling. The part of Medea is a difficult one to sing, yes, but equally or more demanding music is all over the core soprano repertoire. I believe MEDEA's obscurity can best be accounted for on two grounds. First, 19th-century operatic theaters and audiences alike were ill at ease with a work in which the central figure was a powerful and also malevolent woman. The darkest such characters in Verdi, e.g., NABUCCO'S Abigaille, were never more than co-principals, and the likes of Strauss's Salome did not begin to appear until the 20th. Bellini's Norma -- a Medea-like figure who has a warmer relationship with her romantic rival, and *considers* but ultimately does not commit a double child murder -- was and is easier to take. Second, the work may have been too musically advanced for its own good, with its prefigurations of Rossini and Bellini and beyond. Today, it does not seem strong in period charm for the late 18th century, yet is at a disadvantage in competing for attention with operas that, 30 to 50 years later, built on its achievements.

A new production (sung, of course, in Italian and with recitatives rather than spoken dialogue) by Hugo de Ana was unveiled on 5 October 2008 at the Teatro Regio di Torino. This DVD appears to preserve a single performance, rather than a composite edited together from several. The action has been updated to a period that I suppose from the clothing is either the 1910s or the 1920s (de Ana also designed the costumes -- "Gatsbywear," one might say, with Neris sporting the most eccentric getup). The opening scene of Glauce's idyll is set on a beach, and once that scene has concluded, a low-hanging screen lifts to reveal a ship, which will remain on stage for most of the opera (Medea sleeps on board). De Ana makes some dramatic points a trifle bluntly (Medea always wears black, Glauce virginal white), but he limns the drama with efficiency and intelligence. Creonte, Glauce and their subjects are treated with great refinement; they represent the "polite society" Giasone hopes to enter as he closes the book on his past. Into this world, Medea pursues him almost as an elemental force. In the banquet she disrupts with her first, veiled appearance, the director makes an interesting choice: everyone, including Giasone, remains seated for a long time, and this is key within the production, for a display of passivity is their method of dealing with Medea. In a sense, they just hope this violating element will wear itself out and go away. When, later in that scene, Medea desperately throws herself at Giasone, he does not roughly shove her away in the usual manner for an Italian tenor (think of Turiddu in CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA); he responds to the unwanted advance merely by keeping his arms at his sides and *not* catching her as she slides down his body to the floor -- a telling moment in de Ana's passive-versus-active mise-en-scène. In several scenes, Medea is conspicuously surrounded by steamer trunks, suitcases, and boxes full of things from, presumably, happier times (at one point, singing of the children, she makes an appeal to Giasone's sentiment by showing him a photo album): the lady literally comes with a lot of baggage. Throughout, the production impresses as a thoughtful and handsome piece of work on what I assume was a modest budget. In that sense, it is close to a model of its kind.

The stage is populated with good musicians who, as a bonus, make an attractive appearance. The beautiful Anna Caterina Antonacci is not as vocally well suited to Medea as to lower-lying parts she has previously essayed (Bizet's Carmen; Mozart's Donna Elvira; Verdi's Meg Page; Berlioz's Cassandre). Her singing is well controlled for the most part, but the top is less than one could desire, and a beat intrudes on held notes (to this last, one might reasonably counter that both Callas and Jones had oft-rebellious voices, but they also brought more power and reach to it). Antonacci's remains a commendable performance of a role that does not present us with a wide array of contemporary choices on DVD. Singing in her native language, the Italian really savors the words. Giuseppe Filianoti is a sweeter-sounding, more lyrical Giasone than the usual (again...to the degree that one can speak of "the usual" in an opera so rarely given). Of the rest, Sara Mingardo is the standout: a firm and confident yet warm-toned Neris. Giovanni Battista Parodi makes an agreeable fellow out of Creonte. To his daughter, Glauce, Cinzia Forte brings an acceptable comprimario tone and a good enough technique for her aria. The orchestra and chorus, under the direction of Evelino Pidò and Roberto Gabbiani respectively, thoroughly exceed expectations -- Pidò, in particular, gets outstanding work from his players, and deserved the night's most generous ovation.

Except for one instance of haphazard, arrhythmic editing (Medea goes into one of her cases for an item and we get a jumble of illogically sequenced cuts that could be a "what not to do" primer in some filmmaking class), this meets a high standard technically. The theater's stage is not especially large, and two cameras placed to the extreme right and left expose the limits of the painted backdrop but also give us a nicely atmospheric "smoky" effect of dust against lights. The English subtitles are generous enough in quantity but poor in quality, with awkward line breaks and many errors of punctuation and spelling ("godess" for "goddess," "heals" for "heels"), suggesting transcription by someone with limited fluency in the language. The narrative remains comprehensible, in any case. Judging from the length of time it took me to acquire this DVD, and also from its status at this writing as available only at a high price from a single Amazon Marketplace seller, there seems to be a distribution issue -- one hopes this corrects itself, for in most respects it is a release to be received gratefully.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Coolest Thing ..., February 3, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cherubini: Medea (DVD)

... about the 21st Century, for me so far, is the possibility of hearing and watching dozens of fine productions of operas on a wall-sized HDTV with a high-tech sound system! What other, equal thrills the millennium may hold, I can't venture to guess. It seems worth considering whether the apocalyptic "Rapture" hasn't already taken place, with the Chosen 144,000 scarcely missed and the rest of us left behind to wallow in such sinful pleasures as Opera Seria. On such terms, it would be ungrateful to give any halfway decent DVD opera less than a five-star rating, so I'm mildly surprised to find that several earlier reviewers have railed against Anna Caterina Antonacci for the misdeed of not being Maria Callas. Let me declare immediately that Antonacci is superb in the role of Medea, both as an actress and as a musician. Her mad-eyed haggard beauty is utterly compelling, and her portrayal of the conflicts in Medea's heaving breast is utterly human, so deftly nuanced that one can truly take Medea's side, pity Medea's fate, particularly when Jason (Giasone) is artfully portrayed as a shifty 'pretty faced' opportunist, a guy who could never have become a Hero without Medea's passion. And Antonacci is a Musician, not just a can-bellow singer; she brings subtle inflections to her role that were beyond the musical language of opera companies in the era of Maria Callas. If she were recording the role for a studio CD, she might well sing some parts differently, with more emphasis on timbre, but on stage, when she NEEDS to sing beautifully, as in her great duet with Giasone, she has all the voice in the world.

Brief synopsis: Jason has abandoned Medea and their two children in order to marry Glauce, the daughter of Cleon of Corinth. Medea pursues him desperately. He rejects her and Cleon orders her to leave Corinth. Medea takes revenge by poisoning Glauce and slaughtering hers and Jason's two children. Not a cheerful story, and in no way a mixed-genre tragicomedy. It could hardly be darker, but in our sorry lifetimes we've read enough about mothers murdering their children to find it strangely realistic.

And what a feast of anachronism! An ancient Greek myth, in a theatrical genre 'invented' by Italian humanists of the 16th C to recreate Athenian theater, in the theatrical manner of the French dramatists like Racine in the 17th C, in a musical language closely derived from that of the German 18th C operatist Gluck, finally fully realized in an Opera Seria composed at the beginning of the 19th C for performance in France! This staging by the Teatro Regio Torino, likewise, is deliciously heterodox. The setting is a beach in pre-modern Greece, upon which a sailing galley is grounded. There are touches of modern Greece about the action -- the presence of an Eastern orthodox priest, for instance -- but the costumes are clearly circa 1900 small-city Western Europe. The numinous myth is transfigured into a tale of modern passions, something straight out of an early Antonioni film. For me, the synthesis of levels works perfectly; the drama is both mythic and realistic.

Cherubini's Medea itself is a marvelous synthesis of the musical splendor of 18th C opera with the dramaturgical intensity of 19th C opera. One might say it's the best of both. Medea is a very great opera, in my opinion. It might be worth recalling that Beethoven thought so also; he declared that Cherubini -- not Mozart, Salieri, or Paisiello -- was the finest opera composer of the era. (Though I have to suspect that Ludwig had never heard Don Giovanni on stage.) The immortal moments in Medea, to my ears, are the afore-mentioned duet and the extended aria with bassoon obbligato in Act 2, sung by Medea's servant Neris, in this production the musically exquisite contralto Sara Mingardo. Mingardo is worth five stars all by herself. I've already said that soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci fills her musical and dramatic role to the brim. Tenor Giuseppe Filianotti is equally effective, a pretty voice behind a pretty face, yet capable of poignant vocal expressivity when it's wanted. Giovanni Battista Parodi is powerful in the smaller role of Creonte, both a small-town mayor and a Hellenic King. The only slight weakness in this cast is Cinzia Forte in the role of Glauce; she has a tad too much vibrato and swoop amid this context of historically informed agile 'white' voices.

Orchestra good, sound quality good, film editing good and not distracting. What's not to like?

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Antonacci fan!, July 9, 2009

By 

ravennamoon (Naples, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cherubini: Medea (DVD)

Anna Caterina Antonacci is a fabulous, generous singer and actress~!
This is one of her many powerful roles on dvd---we are lucky to have them.
She was excellent as "Carmen", mesmerizing in "Rodelinda" and
a wonderful, spurned "Donna Elvira" in "Don Giovanni"!
I am surprised at the other insulting review of her performance here.
I believe Callas would admire Antonacci's work!