Devičanska svirka

A man heading through the countryside is drawn to a strange castle, which is reputed by the locals to be haunted. There he meets a beguiling young woman who ensnares him in her world of secrets.

Variácie slávy

Fighting for Daybreak

Daybreak, a first-year EDM festival gets hit with inclement weather. As the fear of headliners canceling, attendees demanding refunds, the deeper purpose of the festival becomes clear - but is it enough to save Daybreak?

Leftover Feelings: A Studio B Revival

Two Nashville music icons, John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas, combine their talents during the pandemic to record the album "Leftover Feelings" in Elvis's favorite studio, RCA's fabled Studio B. Walking in the footsteps of Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, and Waylon Jennings through the house that Chet Atkins built, John and Jerry attempt to revive and capture the magical sounds of this iconic room where so many early hit songs were made.

Macbeth

This hard-edged postmodern production of Giuseppe Verdi's haunting masterpiece brings the story of Shakespeare's bloody tragedy to vivid life, characterized by spine-tingling atmospherics and a triumphant debut by American baritone Thomas Hampson in the title role. This Zurich Opera House production also features a mesmerizing turn by Paoletta Marrocu as the beautiful, power-hungry Lady Macbeth, while striking sets and costumes further enhance the duality of the main character whose rise and fall mirror the darkest impulses of man. Replete with supernatural mystery, sexual tension, and violent power plays, this timeless story remains gripping and chilling for today's audiences and boasts some of the most astonishing music of Verdi's legendary body of work.

Verdi Macbeth

Claude D'Anna's film of Verdi's Macbeth is a gloomy affair, stressing the descent into madness of the principal villains. It's acted by the singers of the Decca recording of the opera (with two substitutions of actors standing in for singers) and the lip-synching is generally unobtrusive. The musical performance is superb, conducted by Riccardo Chailly with admirable fire, and sung by some of the leading lights of the opera stages of the 1980s. Shirley Verrett virtually owned the role of Lady Macbeth at the time, and she delivers a terrific performance, the voice equal to the role's wide register leaps and it's suffused with emotion, whether urging her husband on to murder or maddened by guilt in the Sleepwalking Scene. Leo Nucci's resonant Macbeth may lack the ultimate in vocal color and steadiness (his last notes of the great aria Pietà, rispetto, amore are wobbly) but he compensates with intensity in both singing and acting.

Evasion

l'A.M.—a misheard love story

L'amour (love). La mort (death). Two French words that could confuse a foreigner, but never a native. Messenger V writes for a company that sends out both love letters and death sentences. After going into work one day, she finds out her assigned recipient is her lover.

Mozart Apollo et Hyacinthus

First of all it is impossible to conceive of the creative genius who wrote this music when only [...]. Add to this the outstanding musicianship of the young singers/actors and orchestra members.Christiane Karg has a voice that is pure beauty; her range, precision and her ability to convey tremendous emotion are astounding.Her aria "Laetari, iocari" is a tour de force, tossed off with the greatest ease. Then there is the beautiful duet she sings with Maximilian Kiener. This is to die for! The staging, the singing and the acting are of an extremely high level. On the second disc Christiane Karg plays a totally different character, wily and playful, but oh, that voice!

Strauss: Elektra

It's hard to imagine confirmed Straussians not wanting this starry Metropolitan Opera performance of Elektra. Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, transformed Sophocles' take on Homer's tale into a harrowing opera noir. Elektra lives for one reason, to kill her mother, Klytämnestra, and her stepfather, Aegisth, the murderers of her father, Agamemnon. In contrast to Elektra's vengeful obsession, her sister Chrysothemis desires to get on with life. When their long-missing brother, Orestes, returns to do the deed, Elektra celebrates with a dance of death and, her sole purpose in life fulfilled, dies. Strauss joined the hermetic plot to music of the utmost opulence, violent and yearning by turns, evoking the cardinal principles of Greek tragedy - pity and terror.

Boulez-Répons

In this vivid transposition of contemporary music for television, Cahen "responds" to the complex musical transitions of Répons, a work by French composer Pierre Boulez. Performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain and conducted by Boulez, the intricate Répons was designed for an ensemble of twenty-four musicians, six soloists and a "real-time" digital processor. In Cahen's re-composed interpretation, he responds with visual and temporal transformations, "opening" the images in space and time and applying electronic techniques to engulf the instrumentalists in ocean, sky, and trees. Mirage-like superimpositions, temporal shifts, mirroring effects and de-synchronization result in a rhythmic confluence of the illusory and the real. Immersing the viewer in image and sound, Cahen mirrors the transformative process of Boulez's music.

Ascendent

A women takes a journey that questions the boundaries of reality and what is an illusion.

Encore

The audience is consensually prompted to gaze into the small, condensed universe of someone experiencing a fascinatingly destructive egomania. Here, they recognize behavior once thought to be beyond eccentric, yet today somehow normalized - perhaps sprouting from a modern culture of self-centered ideology? We witness in this character the downfall of self-idolatry; the frequent cause and occasional side effect of pathological narcissism; self-hatred. The struggle between loving oneself more than anything, while simultaneously desiring perfection, threatens to upend the film's eerie dreamworld. However, a brief brush with self-awareness only serves to solidify the character's self-obsession. An existential crisis half-realized - drowned in the shallow waters of Narcissus' well.

Opera Gala - Live from Baden Baden

twenty one pilots: Live at Lollapalooza Brazil

twenty one pilots live at Lollapalooza Brasil, at Autódromo de Interlagos, in São Paulo, on March 25th, 2023.

The 1975: Live at Lollapalooza Brazil

The 1975 live at Lollapalooza Brasil, at Autódromo de Interlagos, in São Paulo, on March 25th, 2023.

Lady Macbeth von Mzensk

A young woman, married to a wealthy man, but miserably lonely; trapped within a world ruled with an iron fist. Katerina is driven by a lust for life and for love. Her husband, though, is impotent; her father-in-law a tyrant. No wonder, then, that she longs to free herself from this yoke. When Sergei starts work on the family estate, she sees in him a chance for salvation. However, their subsequent affair marks the beginning of a descent into crime.

Winter Journey: Schubert's Winterreise

Baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu reimagine Schubert's song cycle Winterreise in the wintry setting of an Alpine landscape at the top of a mountain pass in Switzerland - a place that emphasises the timelessness of Schubert's music

Our Season

ZBTV releases a music drama for Our Season by ZEROBASEONE.

I Should Call Her

An overly anxious man mysteriously finds himself unable to leave a bathroom.