Mosè in Egitto (Rossini Opera Festival 2011) [Blu-ray]

Fearlessly controversial and quite brilliant
Director Graham Vick and set designer Stuart Nunn, as well as the administration team of the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival, go to great pains in interviews on the 'Making Of' extra feature included on this release to emphasise that their 2011 production of Rossini's Mosè in Egitto doesn't take sides and offers no solutions, but rather strives to present a balanced account of the impact of conflict and oppression on a population, specifically in a modern-day Middle East context. Balanced it may be, but that doesn't mean that this production plays it safe in any way. Far from it. Vick depicts Rossini's Biblical epic in terms of suicide bombers, terrorists, torture, self-immolation and - perhaps most controversially - styling Moses as an Osama Bin Laden figure, wielding a Kalashnikov and stirring up a Holy War against their oppressors through inflammatory video recordings.

Without contradicting the intent of a single word of the original libretto here, Graham Vick shows...

Fascinating staging with superb performances.
Moses as an Osama bin Laden style Jewish terrorist? Pharoah as a King Hussein of Jordan style leader (with a glamorous wife)? Well, that's part of the conceit of this intriguing staging of Rossini's "Mose in Egitto" by the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in 2011. And, for the most part, it works. Certainly it makes for a very entertaining performance.

"RegiaTheater" is the term used over the past decade or so, for stage works (plays/operas) wherein the director's radical take largely overwhelms the underlying work being performed. It has, here in America, a very negative connotation, smacking of German/Austrian uber-works and director hubris. Most opera fans here will say that they hate it and just condemn these productions, often sight unseen. ("I'll play the dvd but only to listen to the music.") But, the audience for these directorial efforts is more amenable in Europe.

But what is RegiaTheater really? The idea, as here, of changing the time and place...

Not a good surround recording, probably in part due to the staging
I have over 150 classical DVD/BRs that I watch on a 106" screen and listen through a 7.1 loudspeaker setup where the front speakers are about 9' 6" apart and the surround speakers are on my sides. The room has sound treatments so I hear what's on the disc, not distorting reflections from the walls. My reviews concentrate on the surround audio, as you can pretty much judge the video and stereo for yourself on youtube and similar sites.

Picture is fine, the start menu let's you chose the sound track and the subtitles.

Sound is DTS-HD MA 5.1. It seems a bit under-recorded as I needed a loudness setting of -7 db to get to about 82 db at the loudest parts of the opera. Orchestra sound stage is not much wider than stereo, voices only through the center speaker. The principals carry body mics and most voices are clear, but my ears had trouble with Osiride (Dmitry Korchak) and Aronne (YiJie Shi), the 2 tenors. They might not have nice voices, but the applause they...

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