 |  | Rich visual and audio experience - highly recommended |  |
Having been so totally pleased with Julie Taymor's presentations of Mozart's Magic Flute and Across the Universe, I decided to try her version of Stravinsky's opera Oedipus Rex. I was not disappointed. It was a riveting performance, such a satisfying and rich visual and musical experience. If anyone has a hard time getting into the Greek classics, this is the way to overcome that obstacle.
April 10, 2008| | | Converging Patterns of Significance | |
Stravinsky's masterwork "Oedipus Rex" ....a Greek play translated into Latin, set as a monumental-staged-oratorio, Igor's unique stylization of Verdi's idiom, add another layer of Japanese staging....Don't hesitate. Buy it. (One of Jessye's best ever roles)
April 8, 2008Not much to say...I'm simply stunned and speechless, in agreement with the most extreme of all you enthusiasts. I just found this DVD up here in the Mexican High Sierra, and I can hardly express my delight with it. I'm in the classical music world, and really know what a valuable thing Julie Taynor has done for every creative soul: from Sophocles, Cocteau, e.e.cummings and Stravinsky, to all the people she's inspired in the concept of this "oratorio". As Jessye Norman says; she felt she was co-creating with Taynor, something that brought out the best in her. Already a goddess, that's saying something.
The DVD production is A-1, and as Julie and Jessye suggest: turn off the subtitles (you know the story) and just let the magic - the dancing, the sets, the costumes, the acting, and above all Stravinsky's powerful music, transport you back to a time when human beings were the playthings of the gods, and when the rational mind had not yet destroyed our imaginative capacities.
Buy this production NOW before it disappears. You just never know.
May 31, 2007Gifted director/designer Julie Taymor apparently secures one amazing success after another, and this arresting production is surely one of her supreme creations! Adapting the conventions of the seventeenth-century opera-oratorio, Stravinsky's 1927 score marks the beginning of his neoclassical period, with absolute command of both orchestral writing and dramatic intensity. It's interesting that Stravinsky's stated reason for choosing Latin for the score's libretto - '(it) had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalised as to have become immune from any risk of vulgarisation' - is precisely that offered by the Roman Church as the reason for her codification of Latin as its liturgical language (before the desacralisation of the Roman liturgy by neo-modernist barbarians). In fact, Cocteau's libretto was translated from French to Latin by the Jesuit (later Cardinal) Jean Danielou. The impersonality of the text/poem itself has the adroit effect of freezing dramatic consequence to the point of white heat, intuitively heightening the entire drama, something Stravinsky no doubt foresaw and is, interestingly, the key facet out of which Taymor vividly draws unerring pathos. The design of this production is like nothing else! That being said, the singing is magnificent - Jessye Norman, Philip Landridge and Bryn Terfel all in rare and perfect form, Norman especially, with her leonine face and voice delivers a riveting Jocasta in the performance of a career, something all the more shocking given the princely Impersonal so deliberately embedded by Stravinsky in the score itself. Norman and Ozawa have often worked together to wonderful effect (their recording of Carmen comes to mind), and the elucidation of detail he draws from the Saito Kinen Orchestra is astonishing at every turn. This is a piece impossible to completely absorb in one read through, but repeated viewings easily yield its greatness, and the DVD bonus extras are a vital part of reaping every ounce of the greatness of this superb production. Highest recommendation.
December 23, 2006This is the best production of ANYTHING I have ever seen.
I could go on and on about this but I'd run out of superlatives in no time at all.
We've waited a long time for this to become available. I'm glad it's here at last.
June 17, 2006More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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