Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) one of Mozart’s five great repertoire operas, was a great success during Mozart’s lifetime and to this day has not lost any of its magic. In the Schwetzingen Entführung aus dem Serail…

An austere but atmospheric stage and tasteful costumes draw the attention of the viewer to the story and the beautiful voices of the singers. Recorded live at the Ludwigsburger Schloßfestspiele in 1990. Costumes by Dagmar Niefind, stage direction and…

The opera „Cosi fan tutte“ featured in a 2x45 minute best-of-version with narrator. The well-known film director Doris Dörrie, long established on the cinema scene as a master of comic genius and famed for her bitter-sweet love stories, had passed…

«Voyage to Cythera» is a documentary about Luciano Berio's composition Sinfonia. The film concentrates on the third part of the composition, which consists of a number of musical quotes from composers like Mahler, Stravinsky, Boulez, Schönberg and…

Following the success of King Arthur, which was presented at major European festivals, Vox Luminis is discovering Henry Purcell's "The Fairy Queen", a semi-opera in five acts written for the Dorset Garden in 1692. The dramatic plot of the work is…

Beautiful Renaissance music comes to life through your screen. Vox Luminis perform a selection of renaissance motets. Besides Latin works by, among others, the two greatest composers of the second half of the 16th century -Tallis and Byrd-, there are…

Haendel composed only episodically for the church: the Dixit Dominus is a psalm written during his stay in Rome, based on the Venetian models with borrowed Gregorian singing. We are stroke by the wealth of the words we hear: emotion pierces the mind…

Charpentier’s most famous Te Deum – he wrote four – overawes in exultant D Major, with an eight-part ensemble and show-stealing trumpets and timpani. It is no great surprise then that this work – and especially its instrumental prelude – became a hit…

On the 8th of June 1968 Vladimir Ashkenazy, with his Icelandic wife and their two children, arrived at their new home in Reykjavik in Iceland. It was a crucial moment in their lives. They had left the Soviet Union, with the help of Nikita Kruschev…

A series of recitals by the master pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy at a new peak in his career. Both his audiences and the critics have been aware in recent years of new dimensions in Ashkenazy's playing. This may stem in part from his broadening…