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Amour
Octogenarians Georges and Anne are retired music teachers whose daughter lives abroad with her family. When Anne suffers a stroke and is left paralyzed on one side of her body, the couple's abiding love for each other is put to the test.
ANDRE RIEUS 2013 MAASTRICHT CONCERT
Affectionately known as "The King of Waltz", André performs a series of concerts in his home town of Maastricht, in The Netherlands every year. The concerts are performed in front of thousands of fans and are set among the beautiful medieval backdrop of his beautiful home town of Maastricht. As always, André is...
Glyndebourne Festival - Ariadne auf Naxos
The Prologue At a sumptuous home, two theatre troupes are preparing for their performances: a commedia dell’arte group, led by the comedienne Zerbinetta, and an opera company presenting a serious opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. The Major-domo announces that, to save time, both entertainments must be performed simultaneously. The idealistic young Composer is loath to permit any changes to his opera....
Glyndebourne Festival - Billy Budd
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, born suitably enough on 22 November, the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. His powerfully dramatic opera Billy Budd returns to Glyndebourne with Jacques Imbrailo in the title role and Mark Padmore making his role debut as Captain Vere. The tense and stifling atmosphere on board...
Glyndebourne Festival - Don Pasquale
Donizetti was an enormously prolific composer – Don Pasquale is the 64th of his 66 operas, and was written only a year before the onset of the syphilis-induced dementia that was eventually to overwhelm him. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the diamond-bright wit and brilliance of this opera also has a distinctly dark side. Don Pasquale is...
Glyndebourne Festival - Falstaff
Throughout his long career, Verdi longed to find a good subject for a comic opera. Towards the very end of it he found that subject, in the vast and jovial shape of Shakespeare’s John Falstaff. It was the suggestion of his librettist, Arrigo Boito, with whom he had worked on Otello, and Verdi was at first resistant. ‘Did you ever...
Glyndebourne Festival - Hippolyte et Aricie
When Rameau died in 1764, the Mercure de France concluded its epitaph to him with the words ‘Here lies the God of Harmony’. In many ways he defined 18th-century French music, publishing his widely influential Treaty on Harmony in 1722. He was known as the leading music theorist of his time and as the composer of numerous works for the...
Glyndebourne Festival - Le nozze di Figaro
Michael Grandage’s production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro returns, with a new cast of singers making his UK operatic debut. The opera has particular significance as it was the first opera ever to be performed at Glyndebourne in 1934, with founder John Christie’s wife and co-founder Audrey Mildmay in the role of Susanna. ‘This is a Figaro of rare...
I Wish 
Twelve-year-old Koichi lives with his mother and retired grandparents in Kagoshima, in the southern region of Kyushu, Japan. His younger brother Ryunosuke lives with their father in Hakata, northern Kyushu. The brothers have been separated by their parents' divorce and Koichi's only wish is for his family to be reunited. When he learns that a new bullet train line will...
National Theatre Live: Othello
The National Theatre presents a major new production of William Shakespeare’s celebrated play about the destructive power of jealousy. Olivier Award-winning actor Adrian Lester (Henry V at the National Theatre, BBC’s Hustle) takes the title role. Playing opposite him as the duplicitous Iago is fellow Olivier Award-winner Rory Kinnear (The Last of the Haussmans, James Bond: Skyfall), who is reunited with director...
National Theatre Live: The Audience
For sixty years Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace - a meeting like no other in British public life - it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses.
The Audience breaks this contract of silence - and...
POMPEII LIVE FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM
The first live cinema event ever produced by the British Museum, offering an exclusive private view of the major exhibition, Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum. The British Museum will stage two unique live broadcasts to cinema audiences across the UK and Ireland with a special offer to school groups. Introduced by British Museum director Neil MacGregor this event...
ROYAL OPERA HOUSE: GLORIANA
This important new staging of Gloriana marks three major anniversaries: 60 years since the Queen’s Coronation, 60 years since the opera’s premiere at the Royal Opera House, and the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. Britten’s portrait of the public and private faces of Elizabeth I is a brilliant depiction of the Tudor court and the tension between affairs of state and...
Royal Opera House: La Donna
La donna del lago is one of the most lyrical of Gioachino Rossini’s operas, with expansive ensembles and shimmering orchestration. It is based on Walter Scott’s 1810 poem The Lady of the Lake and features a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola. Although its premiere in Naples in 1819 was a success it was rarely staged throughout much of the 19th...
