This is 200th anniversary year of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth. To mark the occasion Parma’s Teatro Regio has released a 30 DVD set which presents videos of the master’s 26 (none of the reworked operas is included) operas and his requiem mass. The pdf file below gives the particular’s of this mammoth collection. Almost all the operas are productions of the Parma house. They are all in Italian.
One hundred years ago Verdi was barely at the frontier of respectability. Indeed, when I started going to the opera in 1954 he was just inside the border. Since that time he seems to have gotten a whole lot better. So much so, that I can say without fear of ridicule that in the theater his only rival is Shakespeare.
My plan is is to get through all these discs in chronological order before Verdi’s 200th birthday – Oct 10, 2013. Many of the earlier works I’ve never seen performed and have only listened to once or twice. I’ll post a review of each production as I go along.
