"Actor: Gilles Cachemaille"

• Mozart: Don Giovanni -- Glyndebourne | DVD | (21/08/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Deborah Warner's 1995 production of Don Giovanni for Glyndebourne is characterised by a central portrayal of the Don as at once evil and sexually magnetic. Gilles Cachemille has at one at the same time a raffish charm and a deep mean-spiritedness--many Don Giovannis don't bully his servant nearly as much as this one, and Warner pushes his sinfulness all the way into sacrilege--apart from mocking the Commendatore's grave effigy, this Giovanni also has his way with a statue of the Madonna. Pieczonka's Elvira is at once stately and sensual--there is no sense of hysteria here, rather more of a deep sadness and sense of a ruined life. Page's Leporello is a wonderful long-faced clown; his catalogue aria is at once genuinely funny and a rather sadistic tease of Elvira. Though Kreizberg is working with authentic forces, the feel of his performance has a passionate gloominess that teeters on the brink of Romanticism without ever exceeding the work's adventurousness. The DVD comes with subtitles in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as a full printable text of the libretto. --Roz Kaveney

• Berlioz Rediscovered - Gardiner | DVD | (16/07/2007) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £16.99

  This new DVD brings together two concert performances with Gardiner a leading Berlioz interpreter conducting his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique. This is a new and unique coupling of two fabulous live concerts! The Symphonie Fantastique is a glorious orchestral tour de force which is central to the repertoire of every major orchestra. It is performed here on original instruments in its original 1830's orchestration in the atmospheric old hall of the Paris Conservatoire where it was first heard. The other work is the first performance of the newly discovered Messe Solennelle. Written when Berlioz was just 20 years old it was thought lost until its rediscovery in 1992. The first performance of this large-scale Mass for 150 years was filmed in London's Westminster Cathedral and is a very special musical occasion. Gardiner's period-instrument orcehstra gives characteristically idiomatic performances of these seminal works (which are also linked thematically through Berlioz's extensive re-use of material from the Messe).

• Don Giovanni - Mozart | DVD | (01/08/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  Don Giovanni - Opera in two acts. A production of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. Recorded in July 2002.