Items Matching Tag 'Music'

Animal Kwackers (DVD Details)
This immensely popular 1970s kids’ series introduced a new ensemble to the world of British pop… one brought to Earth by a flying saucer and entirely unhindered by musical differences or lip-sync issues! Meet the Animal Kwackers – Rory the Lion, Boots the Tiger, Bongo the Dog and Twang the Monkey. Britain’s answer to the Banana Splits – minus the psychedelia and the alarming camera angles –...

Pergolesi: Adriano in Siria (DVD Details)
For the festivities marking Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's tercentenary in his native Jesi, Ignacio García created a new staging of the imperial drama Adriano in Siria. His staging in Jesi's exquisite 18th century Teatro G.B. Pergolesi includes the delightful comic intermezzo Livietta e Tracollo, thus following the precedent set at the premiere in 1734. A fine italian cast and the...

The Jazz Baroness (DVD Details)
The true story of a Jewish British Baroness who fell in love with the musical genius Thelonious Monk. Helen Mirren is the voice of the Jazz Baroness and Sonny Rollins, TS Monk Junior, The Duchess of Devonshire, Quincy Jones, Lord Rothschild, Roy Haynes, Chico Hamilton help recreate her story. The documentary uses private family papers, rare archive, original recordings and location filming to...

Frederick Ashton: Triple Bill (Royal Ballet) (DVD Details)
A sumptuous collection of works created by Frederick Ashton, Founder Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, showcases some of his most inventive and diverse choreography performed by recent and current stars of The Royal Ballet, including Carlos Acosta, Darcey Bussell and Tamara Rojo. Les Patineurs evokes an Edwardian skating party, with all its youthful charm and humour, in contrast to Scènes de...

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Wheeldon/Talbot/Royal Ballet) (DVD Details)
Lewis Carroll's fantastical masterpiece is wonderfully captured in Christopher Wheeldon's brilliantly imaginative new ballet. With Principal dancer Lauren Cuthbertson as Alice, captivating designs by Bob Crowley and a lively, engaging new score by Joby Talbot, The Times descibed this new commission for The Royal Ballet as 'spectacular family entertainment brought to life with enormous...

Verdi: Les Vêpres Siciliennes (Carignani) (DVD Details)
Les Vêpres siciliennes, like the similarly epic Don Carlos, was conceived as a grand opéra for Paris and is driven by the tensions between private passions and public politics. Originally set during Sicily's 13th-century uprising against French rule, in Christof Loy's staging for the Netherlands Opera the action is transposed to a 1940s world of sudden violence and shadowy double-dealing....

Janacek: Jenufa (Bolton) (DVD Details)
The vulnerable young woman at the heart of Janacek's breakthrough opera is a signature role for the English soprano Amanda Roocroft. Here, in Stéphane Braunschweig's clear but deeply affecting production, she is partnered by the Slovak tenor Miroslav Dvorský, as the man through whom she finds redemption, love and hope. The complex figure of the Kostelnicka becomes both tormentor and tormented...

K-ON! - Volume 4 (DVD Details)
The school festival is here again but Yui is out sick. The girls try to make do with Azusa on lead guitar and suddenly Yui shows up. But her guitar playing is just too perfect and she's seems to be too polite to everyone. What has happened to Yui and will she be make it to the performance in time? Melancholy has set in on a cold winter day as all the girls face some troubles doing their own...

Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf (Royal Ballet School) (DVD Details)
Peter and the Wolf  has charmed audiences of every age since Prokofiev composed the score in 1936. In the Royal Ballet's production Will Kemp, as the Narrator, guides us through Prokofiev's famous musical representations of the animal and human characters - a brave young boy (danced by Royal Ballet student Kilian Smith) does balttle with a big bad wolf (danced by Royal Ballet Principal Sergei...

Delibes: Coppélia (Paris Opera Ballet) (DVD Details)
Premiered in Paris in 1870, and inspired by the fantastical writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Coppélia tells the story of a young man who becomes besotted with an exquisite automaton and is finally brought to his sense by his fiancée. In their production from the magnificent Palais Garnier, choreographer Patrice Bart and designer Ezio Toffolutti explore the story's darker side while doing full...

K-ON! - Volume 3 (DVD Details)
Azusa has just joined the Light Music Club and she is shocked that all they do is drink tea and eat snacks instead of practicing. The rest of the band reassures her that they will practice hard at their training camp, but despite Azusa's objections the girls end up playing all day at the beach. Azusa soon learns that reason why the band plays so well is because they have so much fun together....

K-ON! - Volume 2 (DVD Details)
As the Light Music Club rehearses for their performance at the school festival, they realize that they're not officially registered as a club. They need to quickly find a faculty advisor, but that's not something that a little blackmail can't fix. As their new club advisor, Miss Yamanaka coaches Yui to become the frontman of the band and pushes her to the point of losing her voice. Mio is forced...

Turnage: Anna Nicole (Pappano) (DVD Details)
The Royal Opera commission from composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas and director Richard Jones adds Anna Nicole Smith to opera's gallery of tragic women. A pneumatic Playboy model who married an octogenarian billionaire, she flirted with global fame before falling fatally prey to its allure and corruption. With its jazz coloured score and Eva-Maria Westbroek's starry...

Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov (Noseda) (DVD Details)
Boris Godunov is the story not only of a troubled leader but of an entire nation, and its history is as eventful as that of Mother Russia herself. In this new production, the legendary director Andrei Konchalovsky presents a personal vision of the opera that takes Mussorgsky's bare and monumental first version as its basis, while adding the final scene from the composer's revision, in which not...

Tchaikovsky: Pique Dame (Boder) (DVD Details)
Obsessive in gambling and in love, the soldier hermann is the protagonist of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, based on a short story by Pushkin. He is smitten with the aristocratic Lisa and fixated on learning the winning secret of 'the three cards' from her grandmother, the Countess, pleayed by iconic contralto Ewa Podleś. This opulent production from Barcelona's Liceu captures St....

Britten: Billy Budd (Elder) (DVD Details)
Based on Herman Melville's novella of naval life in the late 18th century, Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd is a gripping reflection on good and evil, injnocence and corruption. In Glyndebourne Festival Opera's 2010 production, director Michael Grandage scrupulously recreates the claustrophobic environment aboard HMS Indomitable, the setting for fatal tensions between the young sailor Billy Budd,...

Wagner: Der Fliegende Holländer (Haenchen) (DVD Details)
Austrian director Martin Kušej's pioneering vision brings a challenging and provoking insight into Wagner's opera of love and redemption, with his singular ability to connect characters and their actions to the score. Martin Zehetgruber's spacious, multi-layered sets define the settings therough which Daland (Robert Lloyd), Senta (Catherine Neglestad), The Dutchman (Juha Uusitalo) and the chorus...

K-ON! - Volume 1 (DVD Details)
When young Yui Hirasawa starts afresh at her new high school all she wants is to join one of the school’s numerous extra-curricular clubs and make some new friends, but which one should she choose? The answer is decided for her when she discovers the Light Music Club is desperate for a fourth member, without which it will be disbanded. Enticed into the club by a variety of delicious snacks and...

Verdi: La Traviata (Pappano) (DVD Details)
Reneé Fleming, as the ill-fated courtesan Violetta, leads The Royal opera's stellar cast opposite Joseph Calleja as Alfredo, with Thomas Hampson as his unyielding father. Richard Eyre's classic production brings one of Verdi's best-loved works vividly to life, with stage designs that evoke the pleasure-seeking whirl of Parisian society - the glamorous setting for the doomed love of Alfredo and...

Wagner: Die Walkure (Thielemann) (DVD Details)
Christian Thielemann, " by common consent the leading Wagner conductor of our time" (Die Presse), returns to Bayreuth for this radiant account of Die Walküre filmed at the 2010 festival. Appearing on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time, it provides the only audio-visual document of Tankred Dorst's Ring production, and follows the hugely successful release of the whole cycle of on CD. Two new...

Wayne McGregor: Chroma / Infra / Limen (DVD Details)
The diversity of Wayne McGregor's astonishing talent is demonstrated through Chroma, Infra and Limen, each created for the Royal Ballet, for whom he is resident choreographer. Intimate, yet universal, light yet dark, frenetic yet lyrical, McGregor pursues his passion for exploring the inner workings of the human body and mind, his many-layered and beatiful dances providing visual, sensual and...

VeggieTales Live! Sing Yourself Silly (DVD Details)
The DVD, featuring an important lesson in sharing, captures all the fun of the live tour with energetic dancers, loads of bubbles, confetti, big bouncy characters and 18 of the most classic and popular VeggieTales silly songs performed live on a stage, including “His Cheeseburger,” “Love My Lips!,” and “The Hairbrush Song,” plus a few hits from the 80’s that both parents and kids will enjoy! There...

Monteverdi: L'Orfeo (Alessandrini) (DVD Details)
Monteverdi's seminal first opera tells the dramatic story from Ovid's Metamorphoses of the descent of Orfeo into the underworld to recover his beloved wife Euridice, who has died from a snake bite. In a new production for La Scala, based on a painting by Titian and directed by Robert Wilson, the oepra received a powerful and inspiring performance from a fine cast, the Orchestra of Teatro alla...

Minkus: La Bayadére (Royal Ballet) (DVD Details)
Marius Petipa’s exotic ballet, set in legendary India, is a story of love, death and vengeful judgement. Natalia Makarova’s sumptuous recreation of Petipa’s choreography, with atmospheric sets by Pier Luigi Samaritini and beautiful costumes by Yolanda Sonnabend, stars Tamara Rojo as the Bayadère (temple dancer) Nikiya, Carlos Acosta as Solor, and Marianela Nuñez as Gamzatti whose alluring presence...

John Tavener: Choral Ikons (CD Details)
John Tavener describes his music as resembling ikons 'in sound', a window onto the Divine world. The British conductor and composer James Whitbourn conducts London-based ensemble The Choir in a programme of hauntingly beautiful unaccompanied choral music in performances described as 'impressive and spiritual'.

The Doors (Blu-ray Details)
2011 is the 40th Anniversary of the death of legendary Doors front man Jim Morrison. With their legend intact and music as popular as ever, Oliver Stone’s biopic has been restored and is released here for the first time on blu-ray. Val Kilmer was born to play Jim Morrison, and is supported by a cast that includes Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Billy Idol and Michael Madsen. Featuring music from The...

Strauss,R: Elektra (Thielemann) (DVD Details)
The richness and intensity of Richard Stauss's masterful one-act opera. in herbert Wernicke's compelling production, vividly portrays the relentless pursuit and ecstatic realisation of vengeance. Linda Watson, as a merciless Elektra, joins Jane Henschel as Klytämnestra and Manuela Uhl as Chrysothemis to head a magnificent cast which see commanding performances also from Albert Dohman and René...

Beyoncé: Destined for Stardom (DVD Details)
Award winning singer, actress, and dancer... this triple threat diva has made the world sit back and take notice. Beyonce Giselle Knowles overcame shyness from her humble beginnings in Texas to transform herself into the music mogul simply know as Beyonce. Early in her teens she formed Destiny's Child. Interviews with Beyonce', Kelly Rowland, and Michelle Williams illustrate the group's early...

Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (DVD Details)
A double première: Katharina Wagner's first production on Bayreuth's Green Hill and the first live recording from the festival on Blu-ray and DVD. In this production Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a parable about art and society using images of a kind never previously seen in this work at Bayreuth. "This piece has a very unfortunate history. And in Bayreuth, above all, we finally need to...

AirDrives (Hardware Details)
AirDrives Interactive Stereo headphones offer an interactive earphone experience that brings music into your active lifestyle without separating you from your environment. AirDrives are audiologist approved for all day listening as they exceed the OHSA and House Ear Institute guidelines. Unlike traditional earphones, AirDrives enable you to enjoy music while hearing ambient sounds, thus...