June 8, 2010 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of robert Schumann, one of the most important romantic composers of the 19th century. To celebrate his vast and impressive output, Deutsche Grammophon and Decca have compiled this 35-CD box set of his most important masterworks. Though this is not a complete edition, it includes every major work and a number of rarities covering every aspect of Schumann’s output.
The story tells the investigation started by symbolist Robert Langdon and a good-looking cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, around the murder of a Museum Louvre's curator. In fact, the unfortunate murdered man was Sophie's grandfather, and the corpse was found with a series of symbols and codes, like a pentagram and a Fibonacci number sequence. But police detective Fache will begin to chase Langdon, who escapes after receiving a warning about the captain's real intentions. Sophie has with her a kind of key with dots and number 24 engraved on it, which opens to her and Langdon a big complex investigation that involves a supposedly heretic theory: Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were, in fact, a couple who produced a daughter named Sara. A millenarian sect called The Priory of Sion has kept for centuries the secret of that matter. A masochist and kind of psychopath albino monk, Sibilas, an Opus Dei member, will chase Langdon and Sophie as well, in order to impede that they solve the mystery of Christ and Mary Magdalene, and also the real meaning and location of the Holy Grail. A passionate British researcher, will help Langdon in his quest, revealing to them several symbolisms in Da Vinci's master work The Last Supper, traveling to mythical places in the UK, such as The Church Temple, where it is believed that a group of Templars Knights are buried, and Sir Isaac Newton's tomb at Westminster Abbey, where are located some of the main keys to solve the Holy Grail's mystery
The controversial 1995 Salzburg/Paris co-production of Der Rosenkavalier received a well-deserved revival at the Baden-Baden Festival in 2009. Now on DVD, Herbert Wernicke’s 15-year-old approach turns out to be curiously middle-of-the-road.
Wernicke’s fascination with mirrors proves fruitful here, creating a giant Rorschach test, fractured and multiplied on a vast scale, to provide a riveting visual framing of the artifice and actuality of the work, interweaving drama and comedy, male and female, youth and maturity, pretence and reality, that makes it all appear indissolubly tied together.
The men behind the European downtempo outfit Zero 7 – producers Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker – launched their careers in the music industry as tea boys at a London recording studio. Shortly thereafter, however, both were in the thick of action, working alongside a string of well-known British musicians such as the Pet Shop Boys and Robert Plant. They spent the best part of the '90s honing their production skills behind the scenes. Then, after taking on the name of a nightclub in Honduras, the duo gradually began unleashing their own ideas onto an unsuspecting public.
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.