"Actor: German Opera Berlin"

• Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg | DVD | (24/11/2000) from £98.99   |  Saving you £-69.00 (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  This glorious 1995 production of Wagner's festival opera highlights the central debate about the artist, his inspiration and the academic rules that have to be worked with, or around, by setting it not in the Middle Ages so much as in a high-Victorian world of frock coats and cravats. Wolfgang Brendel's impressive performance as Hans Sachs has both the authority of the great poet trying to make everyone understand the virtues of good sense and a middle way, as well as the emotional appeal of a man whose decision to make Eva's choice between him and Walther is for once a real struggle: Brendel plays him as a man young enough to be a credible rival to the young minstrel-knight. Gosta Windbergh in turn brings real passion not only to the "Prize Song" itself but to the whole opera, not least to the aristocratic/bohemian distrust of the bourgeois world of the master singer for which Sachs ends up rebuking him. Schulte's performance as Beckmesser conveys the meanness and pettiness without buying wholly into the viciousness with which Wagner humiliates his comic villain and through him all of his own enemies. Conductor de Burgos manages to keep the massive scale of this longest of comic operas human and humane--this never becomes a sinisterly intense or vast performance. --Roz KaveneyOn the DVD: This two-disc set comes equipped with scene selection and subtitles in German, French and English, as well as menus in those languages and Spanish. --Roz Kaveney

• Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots | DVD | (26/01/2001) from £26.98   |  Saving you £-1.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  As grand opera goes, few examples of the form have the inherent grandeur of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. The dramatic backdrop is Mérimée's account of the 16th-century St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of thousands of French Calvinists under the Catholic regime. The trick, insofar as there is one, is the way in which the attendant upheaval is reflected in the smallest detail of the lives of the main protagonists. This Berlin Opera production of 1991 carries this process several stages further, embedding--and there really is no other word to describe the thoroughness of the process--the narrative into an indeterminate, hyper-condensed 20th-century setting. While this approach has its own pitfalls, such as the silent "pre-overture" which proposes an unsubtle comparison between the oppression of the Catholics and the persecution of the Jews in wartime Germany, it would be churlish to let them detract from what is a robust and highly memorable performance of this sometimes unfashionable opera. The usual trailer for other Arthaus DVDs is appended. --Roger Thomas

• Tristan Und Isolde - Richard Wagner | DVD | (04/11/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Wagner's erotic opera in a production by the German Opera of Berlin under the direction of Gotz Friedrich with music conducted by Jiri Kout.