Mario Martone signs direction and scenes of this new film-work of Verdi's masterpiece. On the podium of the Orchestra of the Teatro dell'opera in Rome its musical director, maestro Daniele Gatti. the new set-up of the opera to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave is embellished with costumes by Anna Biagiotti and photography by Pasquale Mari.

The Nikolaus Lehnhoff production of Richard Strauss's "Elektra", recorded live at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2010. Iréne Theorin stars as Elektra, with Eva-Maria Westbroek as Chrysothemis, Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra, Robert Gambill as Aegisth, and René Pape as Orest. Daniele Gatti conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker.

Aida (2009) Metropolitan Opera. Verdi / Italian. Live from the Met 2009.

The Met assembled an ideal cast for François Girard’s acclaimed new production of Wagner’s final masterpiece: Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of the fool “made wise by compassion”, René Pape as Gurnemanz, the veteran Knight of the Grail, Katarina Dalayman as Kundry, Peter Mattei is Amfortas, the anguished ruler of the Grail’s kingdom, and Evgeny Nikitin sings the evil magician Klingsor.

One of the lesser known works by Giuseppe Verdi, Simon Boccanegra is regarded by most opera lovers as one of his finest. The action takes place in the 14th century and deals with the political and personal rivalry between the corsair Simon Boccanegra, who has been elected Doge of Genoa with the help of the plebeian vote, and the local nobleman, Jacopo Fiesco. Arthaus presents a visually alert, musically sensitive and disturbingly coherent (Der Standard) production of the piece on DVD. The staging was directed by one of the giants of the European theatre, Peter Stein. His fondness for atmospherically dense spaces in which the characters can fully develop is particularly well brought out in his Vienna production, not least because he had at his disposal two remarkable singing actors for the principal male roles, Thomas Hampson and Ferruccio Furlanetto.

With Cio-Cio-San, the young Japanese geisha at the heart of his Madama Butterfly, Giacomo Puccini created one of the most commanding soprano roles in the operatic repertoire. In this telecast from the Live from Met series, acclaimed American soprano Catherine Malfitano rises to the challenges, traversing a wide emotional range and delivering a vocal performance that is as dramatic as it is beautiful. Tenor Richard Leech is Lt. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, the callous American sailor who takes advantage of Cio-Cio-San’s trusting naiveté, with baritone Dwayne Croft as the stern yet compassionate U.S. consul Sharpless. Daniele Gatti takes the podium to conduct Giancarlo Del Monaco’s production, with its picturesque depiction of turn-of-the-century Japan.

Features a great cast: Ambrogio Maestri is one of the finest Falstaffs of our time. The Italian baritone brings a powerful, versatile voice to his role, but also brings his character a hilarious buffo quality. Daniele Gatti, one of the most acclaimed opera conductors working today, leads a stunning cast of singers including Barbara Fritolli as Alice Ford. Genuinely warm italianita in all of the music-making, combined with a boisterous production by stage director Sven-Eric Bechtolf, turns Verdis commedia lirica into a fireworks display of high spirits as well as what the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called musically and dramaturgically a feast of life and of love of life.

Giuseppe Verdi : Don Carlo

While a number of fine recordings of Moses und Aron exist, this unique DVD of the opera makes a staging of the work accessible, with a variety of camera angle, including a judicious mixture of close-ups and longer shots of the stage. The recording is all the more remarkable for its origins in a live performance, since audience sounds are almost negligible in the DVD. It is an exemplary presentation that merits attention for conveying the opera well. With the stage details intact, and the wide-angle shots planned to make the best use of the stagecraft, the Nickler production, prepared for television by Claus Viller, is a fine example of filmed opera. The sound is quite fine and brings across the nuanced direction of Daniele Gatti, whose efforts join the ranks of other fine interpreters of this work, including Pierre Boulez and Georg Solti.