Catch an Opera at Home

By Christopher Porterfield

We're barreling along in Act II of Berlioz's The Trojans. Troy is in flames. The Greeks are rampaging. As conductor John Eliot Gardiner whips the orchestra to a boil, the prophetess Cassandra (Anna Caterina Antonacci) soars into an aria of despair and defiance, urging the other Trojan women to kill themselves. But hold on. Let's take a moment to hear how director Yannis Kokkos sees this scene. (Cassandra's "vision of fatality," he says, achieves for Troy "a kind of revenge by immolation.") Next, let's cut to Gardiner. (Conducting this music, he says, is "so deeply moving because [Berlioz] does everything that the conductor needs for him.") O.K. Now back to the battle.

That is what it's like to experience an opera the DVD way--in this case, on a three-disc set released by BBC/Opus Arte. And we haven't even mentioned the surround sound, the subtitles in your choice of four languages, the plot synopses--all only a click or two away on your remote. No wonder conductor James Levine says that of all recording technologies, "this medium is, up to now, the best. DVD gives a really amazing, thrilling and altogether remarkable result."

Classical-music lovers seem to agree. DVDs aren't yet as big a factor as classical CDs, which themselves represent only 3% of the overall recorded-music market; but allowing for the fact that they are a fraction of a sliver, DVDs are gaining fast and showing great potential. "They've put a jump start in the aspect of the business that needed it," says Christopher Roberts, president of Universal Classics and Jazz International.

Precise figures are hard to come by, but Tower Records, the nation's largest independent music retailer, reports that since September, classical-DVD sales have been running at least 12% ahead of the previous year's, whereas classical-CD sales in the same period have been more or less flat. With DVD players now in 70 million U.S. households and more and more people hooking up high-quality speakers or surround sound to their entertainment systems, the appeal of DVDs can only grow.

Because they are highly visual, operas and ballets are naturals for DVD, but instrumental music is selling strongly too. "In today's times," says Dennis Hedlund, chairman of Kultur International Films, "because of TV, the computer, all the technology, people would rather see their favorite artists perform." What can be seen has grown more interesting as well. Many of the video releases of 20 or 30 years ago were shot with a single, fixed camera and suffered from grainy images and muddy sound. They were also more expensive than audio recordings. Today's DVDs--often drawn from elaborate television productions and documentaries--offer multiple camera angles, crystalline images and superb sound. And they tend to cost $20 to $40, still somewhat pricier than CDs, but they are getting more competitive all the time.

Nor do DVD producers shrink from a whopping price tag if the material is strong enough. Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, a series that was a milestone of cultural-TV programming between 1958 and 1973, has been released by Kultur as a nine-disc, 25-hr.-long set. Price: $149.95. It's selling "phenomenally," says Hedlund.

As always in the music business, star power is what drives the most successful DVDs, especially if the star, like Bernstein, happens to be dead. DVDs of such departed figures as singer Maria Callas and conductor Herbert von Karajan are top draws, not only because of their charisma but also because their performances have taken on a historic importance. Callas' farewell appearance on the opera stage, in Tosca,at London's Covent Garden in 1965, is the centerpiece of Maria Callas: Living and Dying for Art and Love,which is selling briskly at $24.99 after its release on the TDK label last month.

With more elusive personalities like cellist Jacqueline du Pre, whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis in 1973, when she was 28, and Carlos Kleiber, the notoriously reclusive conductor who died last year, the interviews and documentaries that usually make up the bonus material on DVDs are scarce if not nonexistent. The producers are reduced to offering such extras as "photo galleries." No matter; the releases sell anyway. The performers' names and mystique are enough. Almost two decades after Du Pre's death in 1987, a DVD titled Jacqueline du Pre in Portraitis one of the best-selling offerings from BBC/Opus Arte ($29.99).

Among living performers, the Three Tenors, singer Andrea Bocelli, Levine with his many Metropolitan Opera productions and the vivacious soprano Cecilia Bartoli are just a few of the leading DVD sellers. Cases in point: Levine's two-disc version of Tristan and Isoldewith the Met, featuring tenor Ben Heppner and soprano Jane Eaglen, on Deutsche Grammophon ($39.98), and Cecilia Bartoli Sings Mozart and Haydn, a two-disc set with the Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, on BBC/Opus Arte ($39.99).

Bartoli thinks she knows one of the secrets behind the rise of DVDS. "This is a language young people understand," she says. "It's the language of technology, of being in front of a screen." For this reason among many others, she says, "I think it's the future." Increasingly, it's also the present. --Reported by Lina Lofaro

With reporting by Lina Lofaro