Metropolitan Opera Gala - James Levine's 25th Anniversary (1996)2*DVD9 - NTSC - 4:3 - All Regions - PCM, Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1 - 294min.
Subtitles: German/English/French/Spanish/Chinese
Deutsche Grammophon 073 2319 9 - released 2005
Bryn Terfel and Roberto Alagna - Les Pêcheurs duet:
Works by Georges Bizet, Gustave Charpentier, Charles Gounod, Franz Lehár, Giuseppe Verdi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jules Massenet, Richard Wagner, Jacques Offenbach, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss Jr., Camille Saint-Saëns
Artists: Roberto Alagna, Bryn Terfel, Renée Fleming, Samuel Ramey, Thomas Hampson, Placido Domingo, Ileana Cotrubas, Dolora Zajic, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Julien Robbins, Jerry Hadley, Hong Hei-Kyung, Ruth Ann Swenson, Alfredo Kraus, Deborah Voigt, Frederica Von Stade, Heidi Grant Murphy, Anne Sofie von Otter, Håkan Hagegård, Karita Mattila, Grace Bumbry
This Gala of Galas was held on 27 April 1996 to celebrate James Levine’s 25th Anniversary with the Metropolitan. He made his début with a matinee performance of Tosca on 5 June 1971 when Grace Bumbry sang the title role; Franco Corelli was Cavaradossi and Peter Glossop, in his debut at the Metropolitan, sang Scarpia. Appropriately Grace Bumbry makes an appearance here as a wildly seductive Dalila in the Saint-Saëns opera. Another veteran of The Met, Birgit Nilsson - who made her New York debut as Isolde under Karl Böhm - delivers a witty and moving, spoken tribute to the Maestro towards the end of the Gala and shows, in a brief snatch of aria. that she still has power and range.
...The prodigious programme, cast across two very full DVDs, is set out in full in the above lengthy heading. No doubt this DVD will sell according to buyers’ tastes. Not surprisingly all of the excerpts are sung not in operatic costume but in modern evening dress against a number of shared ‘classical’ backdrops of colonnades, balconies, platforms, drapes, tapestries and banks of flowers.
Find more details at Deutsche Grammophon and Arkivmusic
