Nicolai Gedda
This is the historic concert performance of the final operatic version of Bernstein's Candide. It was recorded on December 13, 1989 at the Barbican Centre, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with a stellar cast of operatic stars gracing the solo parts. The programme lasts a full 2hrs 27 mins. It marks the end of a long and tortured journey for the musical/operetta that spent much of its first 35 years as an orphan in the musical wilderness.
A young woman, married to a wealthy man, but miserably lonely; trapped within a world ruled with an iron fist. Katerina is driven by a lust for life and for love. Her husband, though, is impotent; her father-in-law a tyrant. No wonder, then, that she longs to free herself from this yoke. When Sergei starts work on the family estate, she sees in him a chance for salvation. However, their subsequent affair marks the beginning of a descent into crime.
Zulawski tackles Modest Mussorgsky’s famous opera about the bloody battle for ascendancy to the throne of Russia in the 17th-century! With a score conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Zulawski adds extra layers of devilish meta-textual embellishment by composing the film’s imagery as though we are watching a theater piece of a film crew making a movie about the opera of “Boris Godounov”! As well, the picture is full of delightful anachronisms that mock the then-contemporary Russian government, alongside jabs at other 20th-century dictatorships. So incensed was Rostropovich by Zulawski’s juiced final product — one that took liberties with the narrative’s sexual thrust, amongst other things — that he (unsucessfully) took Zulawski to court for “the violation of the Russian soul”! “Impressive in its use of whirling camera movements as well as mega close-ups of the contracted faces of its singers, ‘Boris Godounov’ is one of the most original opera movies ever made”
In celebration of its 100th anniversary in 1983, the Metropolitan Opera hosts a four-hour performance uniting some of the world's most spellbinding opera singers and conductors. The event includes a ballet from Samson et Dalila and boasts incredible classical performances from Kathleen Battle, Plácido Domingo, Jose Carerras, Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Horne, Leona Mitchell, Luciano Pavarotti and many more.
