Giuseppe VERDI
Simon Boccanegra

CAST
Simon Boccanegra Carlo Guelfi
Jacopo Fiesco (Andrea) Julian Konstantinov
Maria Boccanegra (Amelia) Karita Mattila
Gabriele Adorno Vincenzo La Scola
Paolo Albiani Lucio Gallo
Pietro Andrea Concetti
Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Claudio Abbado

Recorded at: Teatro Comunale, Florence

DV-OPSIBO

Picture Format: 16:9
Sound Format: LPCM stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1
Running Time: 143 Mins
Region Code: NTSC All
Booklet Languages: GB, F, D
Recording Date: June 2002

"Karita Mattila ... created an unusually vital character, genuinely in love with Adorno and strikingly heroic in defense of her father, the voice ringing out boldly in the council chamber scene. Carlo Guelfi proved a physically imposing and likable Boccanegra" www.operanews.com

The personal price of political success is the theme at the heart of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, a tale of intrigue, rebellion, betrayal, assassination and passion. Even though Boccanegra never outstripped Verdi's popular operas, many cognoscenti consider it the most beautiful of his operas.

Set against the class-driven battle for the control of 14th-century Genoa, it sympathetically portrays the embattled Doge of the city as the consequences of his past lead - through an estranged daughter, her competing suitors and a life-long enemy - to his own death.

"Claudio Abbado ... has deepened his understanding of this score over the past thirty-one years, and [his] reading is now of such depth, concentration and unostentatious beauty that the stylistic differences between the original music and the 1881 revision quite disappear, and the work's idealistic advocacy of reconciliation and peace proves quite overwhelming." www.operanews.com