Yet another example of an English Opera production, recorded on an English stage and yet not being on sale in England, sorry, the UK. Anyway, if you are unfortunate enough to live in the UK and you try hard enough and you have a multi-region player then you can get a Region 1 DVD sent over from the USA. Not a great DVD, no subtitles for example. But better than nothing.
The performances are excellent as other reviewers have already said. The sound is too on-mike in places, which gives the game away a bit; my guess is that what we see and hear is a gluing together of material shot at one or more real live performances with a lot of extra material re-shot without an audience.
What makes this DVD poor is not what is happening on the stage but what is happening in the vision mixing department. Terrible camera directing; silly and contrived angles; poor transitions from closeups to wide shots; gimmicky and superfluous "multi-faceting lens" effects. If only it had been directed by a better director of televised operas (the excellent Brian Large springs to mind) then this would have been a wonderful record of a production that is still (2008) being staged in London. It is sad to think that when it eventually ceases to be performed the only video recording of it will be this visually flawed one.
