René Schirrer

Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, [composer Jean-Philippe] Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels.

Among DVDs of "Hoffmann" currently available, this is the only one that even begins to stand comparison with the superlative Powell and Pressburger film (whose ideas it occasionally borrows). Olivier Py's baroque imagination, which sometimes leads him into self-indulgence and incoherence, is well suited to bringing out this opera's darkness and he does an excellent job

John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestra of the Opéra National de Lyon in this 1987 production of Claude Debussy’s opera of jealously and love denied, “Pelléas et Mélisande”, starring Colette Alliot-Lugaz and François Le Roux in the lead roles. The production places the story in vast gloomy castle halls, a sparse but atmospheric environment that only adds to the opera’s sense of dark beauty entangled with doom.

This epic opera follows Virgil, beginning as the Greeks appear to have ceded the field after ten years of the Trojan War. Cassandra tries to warn of the terrible fate to come, but fate is set and Troy falls. The first two acts cover this tragic end, then the flight of survivors to Carthage and events at Carthage continue in acts 3 - 5, culminating in the further voyage for Italy and Rome. This is Virgil's classic epic, in operatic form, in about a three and a half hour performance from French Opera.

Featurette from the Opus Arte DVD of Les Paladins by Jean-Philippe Rameau staged at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, 2004.