Harding Brigitte

It takes a long time to find such a distinguished conductor who, in his early 20s, has already conducted orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic with great success. You will find what you are looking for in this class with the conductor Daniel Harding, who was born in 1975. After many great CD recordings, Harding's work can now be experienced in a fascinating DVD production: in the recording of Mozart's opera »Così fan tutte« at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2005 - staged by Patrice Chéreau, the director of the legendary Bayreuth-Rings from 1980. Elina Garança, the new star in the Mozart heavens (who released a sensational Mozart recital on Virgin Classics in November 2005), is there as Dorabella.

The relationship between Alex Harding and Lucian Ban has been long and fruitful. Their combination of elements of improvisational music have helped the pair develop a unique musical language that transcends the expectations of the jazz genre. Their new recording, Blutopia, highlights their attuned rapport while allowing their music to unfold with their own singular ensemble, propelled by the tuba stylings of the great Bob Stewart.

Filmed in 1979, this delightful staging by Otto Schenk features outstanding singer-actresses Gwyneth Jones, Brigitte Fassbaender and Lucia Popp. Der Rosenkavalier is Richard Strauss’s most popular opera and the greatest comic opera since Mozart. Premiered just three years before the start of the First World War, the opera traces the artistic heritage of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the days of Mozart, where the story is set, to the morbid distraction of the Viennese Art Nouveau.

Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.