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• DVD
• 1. Acts 1 & 2
• DVD
• 2. Act 3.

"Live from the Zurich Opera House, Cecilia Bartoli stars in the virtuoso title role of Handel's drama of ambition, vanity and seduction. Now one of Handel's most popular operas, Semele contains some of his best vocal music, including 'Where'er you walk' and the show-stopping 'mirror aria' 'Myself I shall adore', in which Semele spectacularly serenades her own reflection"-- Container.

• disc
• 1. Act one ; Act two
• disc
• 2. Act three.

As he makes arrangements for his wedding to the youthful Sophie von Faninal, the crude and condescending Baron Ochs requests that his cousin, the Marschallin, select the person who shall present the customary silver rose to his betrothed. The Marschallin sends her young lover, Octavian, to fulfill the Viennese tradition, and after the famous presentation of the rose to Sophie, the two teenagers fall in love. Determined to discredit the baron and win Sophie, Octavian carries out an elaborate practical joke, all to the beautiful soaring music of Richard Strauss.

The comic misadventures of a down-on-his-luck knight looking to earn some money by romancing rich men's wives, a jealous husband, and his wife.

The comic misadventures of a down-on-his-luck knight looking to earn some money by romancing rich men's wives, a jealous husband, and his wife.

• DVD
• 1. Acts 1-3 (137 min.)
• DVD
• 2. Acts 4 & 5 (113 min.) ; Special features (21 min.)

"Monumental operas deserve epochal stagings. And "Les Troyens" by Hector Berlioz is such a work. This grand opera, complete with ensembles and ballets, large choruses and orchestral set pieces, is given an appropriately grand treatment in this production by the renowned Catalan theater group "La Fura dels Baus" recorded at Valencia's Palau de les Arts ... this co-production [features] St. Petersburg's Mariinski Theater and Warsaw's Wielki Theater ... "That this is such a feast for the eyes, a veritable orgy of optical opulence, is due to the sheer inexhaustible fantasy and creativeness of the Catalan artist group" (Das Opernglas). In the first part of the work, Padrissa plays with the present-day meaning of "Trojans" as computer viruses: his Trojan horse carries within it the infection that will cause system failures and, ultimately, destruction. In the second part, Carthage is presented as the mysterious seat of a future civilization, where human life is heading towards self-destruction through environmental disasters. "Ancient myth meets Star Wars" (International Herald Tribune)."--Cmajor Entertainment website.

Follows the life of a middle-class family in the 1850s and is set on the banks of the Volga in a small town, Kalinove in Russia.

• Zoroastre / Jean-Philippe Rameau

Zoroaster, Zarathustra, Sarastro? Find out what French baroque music, the legendary opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the freemasonry of Mozart's Vienna have in common with Rameau’s Zoroastre! With Pierre Audi’s amazing staging and a stellar cast accompanied by Les Talens Lyriques, the opera comes to scintillating life as you’ve never seen it before. In 1749, Jean-Philippe Rameau broke with one of baroque opera’s most central conventions by creating Zoroastre, a tragédie en musique inspired by the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster—and not by Greco-Roman mythology. While Zoroaster may seem an obscure figure to many, his philosophies have come up time and again in classical music… Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra inspired Richard Strauss’s eponymous symphonic poem (later immortalized by Stanley Kubrick in his monumental cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey), and in his Magic Flute, Mozart incorporated Masonic symbolism through the Zoroaster-inspired character of Sarastro, a priest whose ambiguous intentions seem to be an homage to one of Zoroastrianism’s essential precepts, also found at the center of the plot of Rameau opera: the coexistence of good and evil as part of the same whole.