Holiday weeks, quiet in many opera houses, are always a good time to take a detour from live performance to fully staged streaming options online.
And while there’s plenty to enjoy on subscription services like Medici.tv, it’s also fun to scour the purchase-on-demand video titles offered by labels like Naxos and Dynamic. Here are five recent additions to the catalog, featuring some of today’s top vocalists and theatrical artists. These filmed (and subtitled) stagings are available to own digitally — usually priced at $9.99 — thanks to imprints that distribute through Amazon Prime Video.
‘La Traviata’
You’ll have a good sense of opera’s seductive potential about half an hour into Verdi’s classic tragedy “La Traviata”: The hard-partying courtesan Violetta briefly wonders whether it might be time to settle down with the man who showed up at her bedside during a recent illness. This proves a passing thought, however, once Violetta gets to “Sempre libera,” or “forever free.”
The soprano Nadine Sierra sounds appropriately spun up in this aria, captured in 2021 in Florence, Italy. About a year after that outing, Sierra brought her take on Violetta to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as part of her steady ascent there. But this earlier reading is a touch wilder. That could have something to do with the modern-dress staging by the director Davide Livermore, since it also requires the soprano to mime throwing back various liquor bottles. (Livermore’s chosen setting for the second act’s opening — a chic photography studio — makes less sense, but it doesn’t derail things.) And Sierra also has a credible romantic scene partner in the tenor Francesco Meli.
‘Giulio Cesare in Egitto’
Packed as they are with tunes and contrasting energies, Handel’s operas can work just fine without the trappings of a full staging. But pulling out all the dramatic stops can also be a blast, as the director Calixto Bieito demonstrates in this 2023 “Cesare” for the Dutch National Opera. He generally puts the work’s potentates — Caesar and Cleopatra among them — in glamorous, jet-set attire. Characters lurk within or peer around gleaming architectural cubes; they engage in persuasion near luxury pools. The sensibility recalls that of the stressed-out strivers encountered on shows like “Succession.”
In this milieu, the soprano Julie Fuchs gamely delivers Cleopatra’s “V’adoro, pupille” while vogueing in a swimsuit. But all this isn’t as thematically anachronistic as it may sound. Handel’s opera luxuriates in the sensual as well as the tragic; it essentially begins with one dignitary offering a decapitated head to a visiting ruler.
Thanks to his penchant for inserting sex and violence where they may not always belong, Bieito is known as an operatic bad boy. But here, his moves simply amount to doing a good job with this story. That’s true when he shows a bit of stage blood, and when he makes space for a shirtless countertenor or some toned male extras. More important, the director has a stellar cast of Baroque specialists on hand, including the countertenor Christophe Dumaux.
‘Arabella’
In traditional presentations, this opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal can seem hard put when trying to convince you of its romantic idealism. What to make of its passive title character; or the gender-bending role of her sister, Zdenka, who spends most of the opera dressed as a man to lighten her family’s burden amid a retrograde marriage market; or the orchestral language, which is both lush and Romantic, yet also restless?
From 1933, “Arabella” has traditionalist as well as vanguard sensibilities. Which makes the opera interesting — and in a manner that cozy stagings can underplay. Enter the director Tobias Kratzer, who has never underplayed anything in his life. His time-traveling vision for “Arabella” starts in 19th-century Vienna, though with the tweak of visible camera operators onstage who give us proto-film noir close-ups. Later, as the marriage plot shoots ahead, we seem to land in a period of Weimar cabaret. Finally, the contemporary world comes into view, just in time for Zdenka’s gender reveal (which takes on erotic-thriller qualities, thanks to the imagery onscreen). Sara Jakubiak gives Arabella some needed dramatic grit; Elena Tsallagova, as her sister, blasts some bright singing above the churning orchestral commentary.
‘Der Prinz von Homburg’
Should a military leader be put to death for ignoring orders? The composer Hans Werner Henze and the librettist Ingeborg Bachmann consider that question in “Der Prinz von Homburg,” with this production marking his entry into the purchase-on-demand catalog for video streaming. That’s notable for one of the most intriguing (and melodic) members of Germany’s post-World War II avant-garde. Tonal harmony and jazz-adjacent sounds occasionally crop up in this work, which premiered in 1960 — at a time when its meditations on militarism and individualism were still particularly pointed.
This abstract, occasionally grisly staging from Opera Stuttgart is a mixed bag. (There’s a better one from Munich in the 1990s, but it’s currently trapped on an out-of-print DVD.) Yet the orchestral sound, as piloted by the conductor Cornelius Meister, is consistently ravishing. And the best members of this cast — including the soprano Vera-Lotte Böcker, a distinguished Henze interpreter — manage to channel the core operatic tradition that rests at the heart of this experimental idiom.
‘Intermezzo’
For Strauss heads, even “lesser” works of his can be a cause for celebration. But, as with his “Arabella” production, Kratzer seems to be asking, “Is there really any minor Strauss at all?” The composer wrote his own libretto this time — one clearly drawn from real-world experience. (It’s a “comedy” about a traveling opera composer’s conflicts with his stay-at-home wife.) Once again, Kratzer’s compelling update makes use of contemporary culture. The opera’s central couple fling emails back and forth, instead of “cables.” And, via projections onstage, we see how communication breakdown happens even in the iPhone age.
Updated or not, Strauss’s dramatic ideas can still work. (His orchestral interludes flow seamlessly from the energy of the singing actors.) But the role of Christine can still seem like a tough one to make supple. The soprano Maria Bengtsson throws herself into Kratzer’s meta concept; as she dons costumes of heroines from other Strauss operas like “Elektra,” you get the sense that she really is trying to work through her role in the marriage — even as her famous musician husband is being applauded elsewhere.
If Christine cheats more in Kratzer’s vision, that’s perhaps a response to the composer-protagonist’s more defined public persona, which gets a fourth-wall breaking climax. Kratzer has said he doesn’t see the character of Robert Storch as Strauss per se. Yet, in a roundabout way, this director’s postmodern play with the “great man” trope has simply brought more attention to a less-loved corner of Strauss’s catalog.
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