Product Details

• Directors: Henry Hills
• Writers: Richard Foreman
• Producers: John Zorn
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English (Stereo)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Tzadik
• DVD Release Date: July 27, 2010
• Run Time: 62 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B003GOOZYE
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,450 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Richard Foreman is one of the great geniuses of modern theatre, and his dynamic staging of John Zorn's opera “Astronome” was one of his greatest works. Drawing upon Alchemical and Mystical imagery, the visual world Foreman created was sumptuous, provocative and mysterious. For this DVD, 10 performances were captured on film from hundreds of angles and brilliantly edited by filmmaker Henry Hills, a longtime friend of both Zorn and Foreman. You can now experience this once in a lifetime presentation with a whole new intensity. Staged so as to hear the music better and clearer than ever, “Astronome” is a revolution in opera / music theatre.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NO SOUND PROBLEMS ON RELEASE, August 5, 2010

By 

tj - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Vol. 2: Astronome - A Night at the Opera (DVD)

I produced the sound for this release...

i can confirm (on behalf of Tzadik -- we double-checked!) that there was NO COMPRESSION added to the music, it is the same as the cd release -- however because of the Dolby specs there is a 3dB reduction in gain (which causes NO DISTORTION OR CLIPPING). as a matter of fact, a HIGHER QUALITY source was used (24 bit/48 khz) than was issued on cd.

the fidelity of Richard's voiceovers and sound are indeed compressed and lofi, as they were in the performance, as they are in all of his theater. anyone who knows Richard's work will recognize this as accurate.


travis just
DVD sound design, Astronome
sound engineer for Richard Foreman

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating video of an important work, January 30, 2011

By 

Dusty14 (Charleston, SC USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Vol. 2: Astronome - A Night at the Opera (DVD)

Given Richard Foreman's "profound influence" on Zorn, to quote from the accompanying notes, their collaboration on this opera makes it an important release for anyone interested in Zorn's music. As would be expected from the brief but beautiful notes accompanying the CD release of Astronome, this is a non-narrative opera, and neither Zorn nor Foreman has any interest in telling a story. The imagery is not what I would have expected from the "libretto" packaged with the CD, but represents Foreman's unique artistic vision. I probably would have imagined something much darker, but Foreman certainly does provide the sense of ritual and mystery suggested by the libretto, without following it very literally. It has little in common with traditional Western operas (there is no plot, the actors don't sing, and rarely speak), but reminded me more of Chinese opera or traditional Japanese theater.

As usual, the Tzadik packaging is first-rate, but as usual, makes no attempt to explain anything that is presented. While I have never seen Foreman's work before, an accompanying 20-minute bonus film by Henry Hill provides a brief introduction to his philosophy via an interview cut with excerpts from another of his plays, filmed in a kind of You-Tube dancing-cat style. The video quality of the hour-long opera is better than I might have expected, considering that it was filmed with two small consumer video cameras. It was carefully edited from 5 live performances, with some black-level enhancement to compensate for the low-light conditions. (Expanding to a dual layer format may have allowed it to be presented with less compression, but could have caused continuity problems on some players.)

The quality of the stereo soundtrack is excellent, and in spite of the typical AC3 compression, is comparable to the CD release. (A linear PCM track would appear to have fit on the DVD, and would have been a welcome upgrade, however.) Because of another review questioning the audio quality, I took the trouble to view the entire decoded waveform with editing software. There are absolutely no instances of glitches or clipping, apart from a clipped "thump", about 0.2 seconds in duration, that first appears 46 seconds into the opening titles, and is repeated several times later, each time with a precisely identical waveform indicating that it is a probably a recorded sample. There is no audible effect from this clipping, and it could be intentional. See the user-provided images for wave profiles of the entire opera, a one-to-one zoom of the first "musical" passage showing a wide dynamic range and glitch-free recording quality, and a picture of the "thump" to show what clipping would look like. It would be a shame if a questionable review prevented this fine work from reaching its audience.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Sound Problems, Great Quality, October 12, 2010

By 

guaguanco127 (Illinois) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Vol. 2: Astronome - A Night at the Opera (DVD)

There are no sound problems on my copy. I think this is an awesome DVD.