Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex
by Julie Taymor, Seiji Ozawa
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DVD details
Actor: Bryn Terfel, Hisako Horikawa, Jessye Norman, Min Tanaka, Philip LangridgeDirector: Julie Taymor, Seiji Ozawa
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Japanese (Original Language); Latin (Original Language), DTS 5.1; English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); German (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Italian (Subtitled)
Format: Classical, Color, DTS Surround Sound, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 117 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Philips
DVD Reviews of Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex
DVD Review: Brilliant experimental production
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a stunning and daring production of a real jewel. Stravinsky's music for this opera-oratorio is compelling and beautiful. Julie Taymor succeeded in transforming what the composer saw as a static staging into a great experience with the right amount of movement without contradicting the composer's vision.
This was a staged production with some minimal additions to create a film. It was performed in 1992 (and filmed on super film) so, compared to today's films and technologies, it looks old. But, with a little imagination you can be transported into the theater. Being in that theater should have been an incredible experience!
The singers are exceptional including the young Bryan Terfel. The reconstructed sound is very good.
I strongly recommend this DVD to anyone interested in Stravinsky's work, and who longs for creative and daring production of operas that maintain the composer's vision.
DVD Review: Rich visual and audio experience - highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars
Having been so totally pleased with Julie Taymor's presentations of Mozart's Magic Flute and Across the Universe, I decided to try her version of Stravinsky's opera Oedipus Rex. I was not disappointed. It was a riveting performance, such a satisfying and rich visual and musical experience. If anyone has a hard time getting into the Greek classics, this is the way to overcome that obstacle.DVD Review: Converging Patterns of Significance
Summary: 5 Stars
Stravinsky's masterwork "Oedipus Rex" ....a Greek play translated into Latin, set as a monumental-staged-oratorio, Igor's unique stylization of Verdi's idiom, add another layer of Japanese staging....Don't hesitate. Buy it. (One of Jessye's best ever roles)DVD Review: At a loss for words
Summary: 5 Stars
Not much to say...I'm simply stunned and speechless, in agreement with the most extreme of all you enthusiasts. I just found this DVD up here in the Mexican High Sierra, and I can hardly express my delight with it. I'm in the classical music world, and really know what a valuable thing Julie Taynor has done for every creative soul: from Sophocles, Cocteau, e.e.cummings and Stravinsky, to all the people she's inspired in the concept of this "oratorio". As Jessye Norman says; she felt she was co-creating with Taynor, something that brought out the best in her. Already a goddess, that's saying something.
The DVD production is A-1, and as Julie and Jessye suggest: turn off the subtitles (you know the story) and just let the magic - the dancing, the sets, the costumes, the acting, and above all Stravinsky's powerful music, transport you back to a time when human beings were the playthings of the gods, and when the rational mind had not yet destroyed our imaginative capacities.
Buy this production NOW before it disappears. You just never know.
DVD Review: simply superb!
Summary: 5 Stars
Gifted director/designer Julie Taymor apparently secures one amazing success after another, and this arresting production is surely one of her supreme creations! Adapting the conventions of the seventeenth-century opera-oratorio, Stravinsky's 1927 score marks the beginning of his neoclassical period, with absolute command of both orchestral writing and dramatic intensity. It's interesting that Stravinsky's stated reason for choosing Latin for the score's libretto - '(it) had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalised as to have become immune from any risk of vulgarisation' - is precisely that offered by the Roman Church as the reason for her codification of Latin as its liturgical language (before the desacralisation of the Roman liturgy by neo-modernist barbarians). In fact, Cocteau's libretto was translated from French to Latin by the Jesuit (later Cardinal) Jean Danielou. The impersonality of the text/poem itself has the adroit effect of freezing dramatic consequence to the point of white heat, intuitively heightening the entire drama, something Stravinsky no doubt foresaw and is, interestingly, the key facet out of which Taymor vividly draws unerring pathos. The design of this production is like nothing else! That being said, the singing is magnificent - Jessye Norman, Philip Landridge and Bryn Terfel all in rare and perfect form, Norman especially, with her leonine face and voice delivers a riveting Jocasta in the performance of a career, something all the more shocking given the princely Impersonal so deliberately embedded by Stravinsky in the score itself. Norman and Ozawa have often worked together to wonderful effect (their recording of Carmen comes to mind), and the elucidation of detail he draws from the Saito Kinen Orchestra is astonishing at every turn. This is a piece impossible to completely absorb in one read through, but repeated viewings easily yield its greatness, and the DVD bonus extras are a vital part of reaping every ounce of the greatness of this superb production. Highest recommendation.
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