Giuseppe Verdi: Giovanna d’Arco – Ramon Tebar

With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) combines the worlds of film and opera at the Festival Verdi in Parma with an all new approach to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco, staged and edited by himself and Saskia Boddeke. Turning the auditorium into part of the set, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese into his staging. With the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a striking imagery that includes depictions of the Madonna, modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children. ‘It is a thrilling moment when threads of light spread over the darkened arches during the overture, shaping the architecture and flooding the whole area with changing light patterns’ (Daily Express).

[Vittoria Yeo is] a plucky Giovanna, if without Netrebko’s vocal glamour, a touch sour on occasion,. Luciano Ganci forces quite a lot as Carlo but it’s often an attractive voice, and solid baritone Vittorio Vitelli does well as Giacomo. — Gramophone Magazine, December 2018