Product Details

• Actors: Diana Damrau, Angelika Kirchschlager, Thomas Allen, Anja Silja, Colin Davis
• Directors: Moshe Leiser, Patrice Caurier, Sue Judd
• Writers: Engelbert Humperdinck, Adelheid Wette
• Producers: Royal Opera House, Angela Alvarez Rilla, James Whitbourn
• Format: Classical, Color, Widescreen
• Language: German (PCM Stereo), Italian (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Opus Arte
• DVD Release Date: July 28, 2009
• Run Time: 138 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0028O34S6
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128,697 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Humperdink: Hansel and Gretel [Blu-ray]" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

ClassicsToday.com, Robert Levine, September 15, 2009

Set (by Christian Fenouillat) and costumed (by Agostino Cavalca) in the recent past (the 1970s or '80s), Covent Garden's new production of this opera contains the requisite wit, charm, and ghastliness to make it work wonderfully. The first act is set in the kids' small, crooked bedroom; there's barely any room for them to romp and their boredom is understandable. The dance is well done, with Gretel gazing at a photo of a ballerina to imitate and Hansel more rambunctious. The next scene's forest setting is very effective, with projections and lighting adding to the children's sense of dread.

The Yoda-like Sandman in a white suit is adorable, and the dream sequence, in which forest animals--big and gentle--turn the darkening woods into a comfy living room with a fireplace and armchairs, is lovely and touching, with a wistful moment at the end when the children each unwrap a big gift box and find a half sandwich inside, which they proceed to eat. The Dew Fairy looks vaguely like Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Once we enter the Witch's kitchen, a tingle goes up the spine. In addition to a very long table, center stage, there are two huge ovens on the right, and at the back of the stage, a huge, glass-doored freezer filled with hanging children. During her ride, she takes one of the kids down, plops him onto her table, slathers him with cream and pops him into the oven. Creepy. At the finale, when the gingerbread kids come back to life and Peter and Gertrude enter, they pull the witch out of the oven and eat her. Hansel and Gretel do not take part--they cower. And can you blame them? It's even creepier--and very effective. Kudos to directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier for creativity and knowing when sentimentality isn't called for.

Musically the performance is just as interesting. Colin Davis manages to lead a production both luxuriant and perky without sacrificing either. He sweeps through the high-Romantic moments and dances through the others; the strange sounds in the forest that spook the kids are indeed spooky.

Starting at the bottom of the voice range we find Thomas Allen's Father, who is so fine an artist--and just a bit drunk as he enters--that for once his "Tra la la la" doesn't seem to go on too long. Elizabeth Connell's Gertrude is grandly formed--she's a big woman with a big voice--and she has great feeling. Angelika Kirchschlager's Hansel is among the best I've heard and seen: wearing overalls and sporting a spiky haircut, we get the ideal of the bored boy, naughty, wanting to be more grown-up, and singing beautifully. Diana Damrau, a plain-Jane Gretel with awkward pigtails, gets along famously with her brother, dancing, playing, being huffy. They work well off one another and their voices blend beautifully. The Sandman and Dew Fairy are lovely.

What can one say about Anja Silja's Witch? Grotesque--she's first seen with her large, prosthetic breasts hanging out, but buttons herself up once she meets the children--and perhaps once elegant but now falling to pieces (think: Grey Gardens), going through her child-murdering routine as if it were another day at the job, her sinisterness all the more potent for lack of trying. The voice is in tatters but you won't mind; this is what witches sound like, you'll think.

This is now the preferred version on DVD: The old Met one with Blegen and Stade is excellent but very traditional; the new Met one with Alice Coote under Vladimir Jurowski sounds wonderful but is sour and wrong-headed directorially; the Solti-led film from 1981 stars the spectacular Gruberova and Fassbaender but is sonically dated. You'll love this new set.

Product Description

Diana Damrau and Angelika Kirchschlager star in the
acclaimed 2008 production of Humperdinck's famous fairytale
opera, in the company of two of Britain's most revered
musical figures: Thomas Allen, playing the role of the Father,
and the legendary conductor Colin Davis. Directors Patrice
Caurier and Moshe Leiser combine their characteristic wit
and a dash of deliciously dark comedy with the opera's
fairytale charm. Humperdinck s music mixes catchy folk-like
songs with sumptuous instrumental colour, making the result
as tunefully approachable, musically memorable and visually
delightful as opera gets. Filmed in High Definition and
recorded in full Surround Sound.

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nahrhaft, August 2, 2009

By 

Todd Kay - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Humperdinck: Hansel and Gretel (DVD)

Last year's EMI Met DVD (a performance that had been HD-broadcast to movie theaters on 1 January 2008) put considerable technical brilliance, both musical and in terms of stagecraft, in the service of a remarkably coarse and charmless production. Opus Arte now sticks its oar in with a strong alternative: a Royal Opera House, Covent Garden performance that also was shown in theaters, dated 9 December 2008 -- near the end of the same calendar year the Met's had inaugurated. The two performances contrast in many ways: The Met's was in a new English translation; the ROH, with Teutonic divas in the three longest roles, is in the language the composer set. Met conductor Vladimir Jurowski's reading was all Romantic extroversion and exuberance; the ROH's Sir Colin Davis favors Classical restraint. The Met had a tenor Witch; the ROH opts for the more traditional choice of a veteran soprano. In most areas, the faceoff has to be scored a victory for the British.

In one of the bonus featurettes, Sir Colin Davis opines that the elegance and concentration of Humperdinck's music makes HÄNSEL UND GRETEL more Mozartian than, as is usually said, Wagnerian. One can hear this view in his understated approach. Everything is precisely blended, and the maestro seems to go out of his way *not* to call attention to symphonic transitions within scenes -- the effect is that of well-oiled gears shifting ever so quietly. I could imagine someone preferring this to the work of Jurowski on the Met DVD, perhaps on the grounds that Davis is "not getting in between the listener and the music" or is "letting the music speak for itself." But I prefer the bolder colors, more imaginative accenting, and sharper rhythmic profile of Jurowski, who (let us not mince words) also had the better orchestra with which to work. The dazzling execution of Humperdinck's score is, in fact, the best reason to acquire the EMI DVD, and it is the Met's one significant boasting point in head-to-head comparison here.

About our faux-youthful protagonists, Angelika Kirchschlager (Hänsel) and Diana Damrau (Gretel), I have no reservations. Physically, they are such a convincing pair of German children that they may be unrecognizable from prior encounters as, for example, Octavian and the Queen of the Night. They sing beautifully individually, and they also team affectingly. Whereas the Met's Alice Coote and Christine Schäfer were saddled with a staging that emphasized Hänsel's bullying and Gretel's suffering, Kirchschlager and Damrau are allowed to be affectionate companions-in-arms. Their carrying out of the choreography in the dancing lesson is delightful, and Act II's Evening Prayer is exquisitely moving to hear as well as to see. For two minutes and 35 seconds, you may well forget dramatic context, stop thinking about "Hänsel and Gretel," and consider that these singers could represent *any* children of any time and place who are cold and hungry in the night, frightened of monsters imagined or real, clinging to one another for warmth. It almost but does not quite make an anticlimax of what comes next: the dream pantomime in which the Guardian Angels (winged and white-robed but with animal heads) conjure up a cozy study with a fireplace, with mute cameos from Father and Mother, who present gifts to the dreaming children. I would not dream (no pun intended) of spoiling the conclusion of this scene, but it is logical and a little heartbreaking.

Armed with the piercing shards of what was an important dramatic-soprano voice in the 1960s, Anja Silja, 68 at the time of this recording, soldiers on. Although her instrument has not always done her bidding or been pleasing to the ears, her musical instincts have never deserted her. These, her stage presence and the intensity of her declamation allow her to create a full and imposing Knusperhexe. Thomas Allen tells a good tale as Father Peter, but Maestro Davis is at his most blank in the scene for the parents, which just seems there to be gotten through uneventfully, and Elizabeth Connell disappoints as Mother Gertrud. With Anja Silja on deck in the second half as the Witch, it may not have been the brightest idea to cast a Mother with a shrill and cutting top. That aside, Connell does not seem to have been allowed or encouraged to find a sympathetic core to this unhappy, exhausted woman. Turn to Helga Dernesch in the Solti/Everding/DG film to see something extraordinary made (in close-up, yet) of Mother's prayer, post banishment of the children.

Directors Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, commendably, do not shy away from the source fairy tale's darker elements, but they cannot resist a few debatable "adult" touches, and so parental discretion is strongly advised. In the happy interlude before Father learns how Mother has punished the children, the parents begin to undress for a romp on Gretel's bed (the whole first scene is set in the children's bedroom rather than the usual kitchen). At her first appearance, Silja's Witch wears her dowdy blue sweater unbuttoned with nothing underneath, exposing improbably supple and round, indeed soccer-ball-like prosthetic enhancements. For her confrontation with the children, fortunately, she buttons up. The bodies of previously captured children are visible hanging from nooses in the Witch's freezer -- they are obviously dummies, and they revive on schedule and are replaced with real children when the Witch herself is conquered, but it lingers as a grisly image. Hänsel and Gretel do not fully partake in the celebratory close; as the other children greedily devour the baked Witch, they still cling to each other in isolation, survivors of a terrible ordeal. (At final curtain, Kirchschlager and Damrau slowly back away from the tableau, toward the audience, and initially remain in character, pretending to be frightened and overwhelmed by the audience's cheers and applause. Later in the ovations, Anja Silja receives and basks in mock booing from the ROH audience for her villainous turn.)

On the whole, this is a worthy live, up-to-date supplement to the aforementioned 1981 Solti/DG film, which boasts a stunningly consistent cast of its period (Fassbänder, Gruberova, Prey, Dernesch, Jurinac), plus the orchestral sheen of the Vienna Philharmonic, but was filmed on sets with below-average lip-sync work. It is good to see that the ROH has not adopted the regrettable practice in the United States (at the Met as well as in smaller regional theaters) of giving this opera in English, presumably under the assumption that children will find it more accessible if the foreign words they can't understand without titles are replaced with English words they can't understand without titles. And, of course, we would never want to send our youth away thinking that opera appreciation will entail listening to people singing in a foreign language.

Humperdinck's short opera is excessively spread out across two discs here, but if there were some demonstrable audio and/or visual gain in the extravagance (and not just an inflation of the list price), I suppose I should declare myself in favor.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful production and score. Damrau sparkles. Not for kids., September 23, 2009

By 

Ben Frey (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Humperdink: Hansel and Gretel [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)

Everyone knows this story. Two poor hungry children are sent out into the woods to pick berries and find themselves captured by a witch whose house is made of gingerbread and sweets. She wants to eat them. Depending on the version you've read, either the witch gets her way, or she gets cooked in her own oven. This Humperdinck opera follows the latter interpretation, and in some ways that seems a shame, because it's hard to take the creepiness of the witch as seriously when she's so flatly dumb about what's happening. You can't help but wonder how this witch found a child she COULD trick? Enough about the plot.

This is, honestly, a great production. The score is moving and beautiful, and it is masterfully performed here. The audio clearly benefits from the Blu-ray format. All of the performers did admirable jobs singing their parts, but standing out above and beyond all others were Diana Damrau (as Gretel) and Thomas Allen (as Father). Allen's performance is boomy and believable as the carefree, drunken Father who comes home to find his children sent out by the rather spiteful Mother into the (apparently dangerous) woods. You can't help but wonder why Mother and Father had never discussed the fact that a witch who eats children lives in the woods outside their house...you'd think that would have come up at some point.

Anyway, Damrau's performance of Gretel is inspiring. You can't exactly say she "stole the show" as it is pretty much the lead role, but her beautiful voice and the whimsical sparkling in her eye really put Hansel's character firmly out of your mind when she's singing. You almost forget its in German and you're reading everything!

When the witch finally shows up, she is wearing a sweater with the top and bottom buttons fastened, and the rest of them undone, completely exposing her strangely-painted [...]in a very strange (and apparently pointless) way. I guess when witches are wandering around in the woods, they like to feel at one with nature. Without getting cold shoulders.

When the scene shifts into her gingerbread house, she trades in the exposed nipples for a walker. Yes, a walker. The little metal frames with two wheels that old people use to get around more easily. This is just one of a bizarre string of production decisions that were taken to bring a modern-day mentality to a very old story. Other examples include the occasional "all stars" t-shirt, or plastic bag from a grocery store. Sometimes these choices were funny and clever. The walker was just there to be weird.

I should probably say something about the picture quality, as this is a Blu-ray release. In a word: Fantastic. The cameras are not afraid to get close to the performers, and with so many wonderful expressions coming from Damrau throughout the performance, this is most definitely a good thing. You can really connect with the childrens' playful spirits and get lost in their play. The set design is somewhat unique, although I can't really say that there seemed to be any reason for the uniqueness.

Why make the walls in the bedroom crooked? Was it to make Hansel and Gretel seem smaller than they actually were? If that was the intent, then they should have made the beds bigger to dwarf them.

There are several "what tha?" moments that left me scratching my head. Regardless, the overall effect of this performance is a positive one. Not for children, even aside from the exposed [...]. There are some really dark moments at the end that are perfectly valid story elements, but still not something I would want my kids to see portrayed so graphically.

In short: Worth it for Diana Damrau's performance, the Blu-ray visuals, and the score.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humperdinck scores big!, September 23, 2009

By 

Taylor - See all my reviews

This review is from: Humperdink: Hansel and Gretel [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)

This is one of my new favorite Blu-rays - the picture is incredible and the sound is wonderful. The performers are all incredibly talented, and let me say - this is NOT your typical opera. It's full of hysterical innuendos and the characters expressions are not typically opera (aka they actually have expression). If you're new to opera and wonder how Hansel and Gretel translates to the sung-word, I highly recommend picking this up!

Oh - I should mention that if you're thinking about showing this to your kids, watch it first. There is an interesting twist mid-way through the second act. In true Grimm fashion, Hansel and Gretel is a pretty dark story!