Gounod's Roméo et Juliette

[sporkadelic]

Under our copyright laws here in the US, no sound recordings will fall into the public domain until 2067.  The particular problem for Naxos is that they have an American corporate presence (Naxos of America, based in Tennessee) which makes them a ripe target for a lawsuit like the one Capitol brought against them.  It's not worth the trouble for Capitol to sue a company like Pavilion, the UK-based producers of the Pearl label, so their products can be sold in shops here.

[marvinbrown]

Hi Marvin,  thanks for the kind words.  My shoulder is not totally well yet but is making improvements.  The deal with Naxos CD's is this.  I believe all of Europe says a copyright extends for 50 years.  It used to be 50 years in the US also.  In the US we now have to wait many more years than 50 before the book or CD or whatever is considered out of copyright.  I think that situation is the result of record, DVD, CD, books lobbying our government to make the law for how long the copyright is in effect much longer than it is in Europe.  As a result operas performed at the Met 50 years ago Naxos can sell copies of the original performance to people in Europe but not to people in the US.

Another situation that is unfair to people in the US is the cost of prescriptions.  We must pay a much greater amount than the rest of the world does.  When the patent expires, then other drug companies can make their own drugs to sell to people in the US.  These are called generics.  They are just as good as the original drug but the prices are much, much cheaper.  I am buying a generic right now.  It just became available last summer.  It was an extended release capsule, which was nice because one took all the capsules needed for the day at one time in the morning.  The capsules spread themselves out over the day.  Now I buy the generic which is not extended release and which means I have to remember to take the capsules at 3 other times during the day.  As a result anyone coming to visit me will see 2 or 3 pills here on my computer keyboard.  Even with that I still manage to forget to take them.

The copyright and patent situations are examples of why Barak Obama is determined that no lobbyists will be allowed to corrupt the congress with bribes, etc.  I don't believe he was totally successful but he tried.

  Hi Anne I hope your shoulder gets better soon  .  Thank you so much for explaining the situation with copyright clearly in the US.  It seems unfair how records are allowed to be sold in some nations as opposed to others.  It makes me wonder what we here in the UK are deprived of hearing and seeing as a result of our own laws  ! 

  marvin

[Anne]

  Hi Anne I hope your shoulder gets better soon  .  Thank you so much for explaining the situation with copyright clearly in the US.  It seems unfair how records are allowed to be sold in some nations as opposed to others.  It makes me wonder what we here in the UK are deprived of hearing and seeing as a result of our own laws  ! 

  marvin

Hi Marvin,

I have not heard of any problems w/British law.  Of course there are a lot of things I don't know.   

[Elgarian]

Just looking for an excuse to talk about Romeo et Juliette here. Two things, really. First, I have the Alagna/Gheorghiu/Plasson recording, and I simply love it: I've no expertise for determining whether the French is good, but it convinces me; and the singing is tremendous.



But also, I wanted to mention what strange things can infiltrate our mental images as we listen. I've only seen one production of R&J, and that quite recently (by Opera North); but ever since I've been haunted by the memory of the sleeping Juliette descending slowly from the ceiling, lying on a kind of large, slightly tilted platform. I don't know why this stuck; but it did. And now I can't listen without that image returning.

Can anyone recommend a good version on DVD?

[Anne]

I haven't bought it yet but plan to eventually and that is the performance from Covent Garden conducted by Solti.  It has been out for quite a while and always seems to be praised.  Gheorghiu is Juliette.  Romeo's character's name escapes me at the moment.

[Brünnhilde forever]

Why not try this one:

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=74659&album_group=2

[Brünnhilde forever]

Or that one:

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=211071&album_group=2

[Elgarian]

I haven't bought it yet but plan to eventually and that is the performance from Covent Garden conducted by Solti.  It has been out for quite a while and always seems to be praised.  Gheorghiu is Juliette.  Romeo's character's name escapes me at the moment.

Thanks Anne. The only Covent Garden production I can find on Amazon is this one:



I wonder if your Solti/Gheorghiu is out of print? (They don't have it at the Covent Garden shop.)

@Brunnhilde Forever:

Thanks to you, too. I think what troubles me about this one:



... is first, that it's very severely cut (about half, if I remember rightly); and second, that it's a movie, with presumably the attendant lip-synching problems that tends to involve. So that leaves this one:



This has Villazon to recommend it, which is a fair bet. But still, there seems no obvious contender that leaps out and says 'Buy me! Buy me!'

[knight66]

I don't recall Solti ever conducting a Gounod opera. Anne, might it be by someone else?

Mike

[T-C]

As far as I know, there is no DVD version of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette with Solti.
But there is a DVD for Verdi's Otello from the ROH with Solti... 

The Arthaus DVD with Alagna and Gheorghiu is an opera film that has a prerecorded soundtrack. About a third of the opera is missing, so for me this is not exactly the definitive version...

The ROH 1994 production with Alagna and Vaduva that is conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras is good, but I like better the latest addition from the Salzburg Festival 2008. The young conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin is excellent in this music. The original cast had Villazon and Netrebko. But because of Netrebko's pregnancy, she was replaced with the young Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze. Netrebko's voice is richer but Machaidze has a better coloratura technique. I enjoyed this performance immensely, and I think this is the one to have.

[Elgarian]

The ROH 1994 production with Alagna and Vaduva that is conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras is good, but I like better the latest addition from the Salzburg Festival 2008. The young conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin is excellent in this music. The original cast had Villazon and Netrebko. But because of Netrebko's pregnancy, she was replaced with the young Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze. Netrebko's voice is richer but Machaidze has a better coloratura technique. I enjoyed this performance immensely, and I think this is the one to have.

Ah, good! That's the last one illustrated in my post (above). Thanks very much for this.

[Wendell_E]

As far as I know, there is no DVD version of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette with Solti.
But there is a DVD for Verdi's Otello from the ROH with Solti... 

There's also a DVD of Traviata from the ROH with Solti and Gheorghiu.  I thought that my be what Anne was thinking of.

[knight66]

TC to the rescue again!

Mike

[Anne]

Wendell has it!  I had just remembered that it was La Traviata and was going to post it.  Thanks, Wendell!

[Tsaraslondon]

I would just add that the Covent Garden DVD has Alagna at his youthful best. I saw this production at Covent Garden, and Alagna produced some of the finest tenor singing I had heard in years. I'm not sure if that initial promise was ever quite fulfilled, but there is no denying how good he was then. Vaduva is a winningly girlish Juliette. Admittedly a very traditional production, I enjoyed it immensely.

[Lilas Pastia]

In a sense, the constant popularity of Roméo always puzzles me. There are many French operas of similar musical quality that are only intermittently picked and dusted off by opera companies. In any case I think that recent productions such as the Villazon ought to have a large distribution. It strikes me as one that has many key ingredients to that elusive operatic idiom's success. One of which is no holds-barred, emotional singing within an elegant, very classical form. Somewhat like La Sonnambula. It is destroyed by bulls in the china shop, but also by wimps on the baseball field.