Opera

Donizetti's three-act tragic opera Belisario was a resounding success in its day, driven by its composer’s superlative theatrical instinct and his skilful interweaving of intense tragic narrative and emotional pathos. Belisario is betrayed by his wife Antonina, who falsely accuses him of high treason. Belisario is blinded and exiled, with proof of his innocence coming too late, and is mortally wounded during a final military victory. This production was performed and recorded without an audience in Bergamo during the Covid-19 lockdown in November 2020 – a moving performance reflecting a spirit of defiance amidst ruin and darkness.

With a world-beating roster of exclusive opera singers including Luciano Pavarotti, Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming and Joan Sutherland, Decca Classics has always invested infinite energy and enormous care on its productions, blending the greatest casts with experienced opera orchestras and great conductors. The result of this mix of world-beating artists, unrivalled technical skill and know-how is an opera catalogue of matchless artistry and superb sound, garlanded with award around the world.

A daring wife disguises herself in order to be hired as a prison guard and thus rescue her unjustly detained husband: the story of Leonora, taken from the French novel by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is familiar to us through Beethoven’s only opera.

Orange Mountain Music and the Metropolitan Opera are proud to announce the release of Philip Glass’s opera SATYAGRAHA across a variety of media. SATYAGRAHA portrays Gandhi’s years in South Africa during the time he developed his tools for social transformation through nonviolence. Captured at the 2011 revival of the work, the production was directed by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch and starred Richard Croft as Gandhi along with a stellar cast with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra & Chorus under Dante Anzolini. Sung in Sanskrit from texts drawn from the Bhagavad Gita, the opera dramatically portrays the vocal text was by Constance DeJong with book by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong. The Met Opera’s co-production with the English National Opera was heard in New York in 2008 and 2011 and in London in 2007, 2013, and 2013.

Decca, the opera company, presents a premium collection of the 100 most beautiful opera tracks on 6 CDs. Enjoy classic arias and overtures, performed by the greatest opera stars of all time. This is a fine compendium of opera's "greatest hits" by great singers including Pavarotti, Bartoli, Caballe, Horne and Sutherland from opera's latest "golden age" in the last decades of the 1900s. They're all there on six CDs, from Pavarotti's great "Nessun Dorma" to Sutherland's "Casta Diva."