{"product_id":"880242727084","title":"Erik Nielsen - Tchaikowsky: The Merchant of Venice - Import DVD","description":"\u003cp\u003eCredits:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eErik Nielsen\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDescription:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing Weinberg's The Passenger, another astonishing operatic premiere from the Bregenz Festival.\nThe Merchant of Venice by Andre Tchaikowsky, the outstanding pianist who died young\n\nThe composer of The Merchant of Venice is not the Russian Pyotr but the Polish-born Andre Tchaikowsky (1935-1982). A virtuoso pianist who recorded for RCA among others, he died of cancer at the age of 46. He himself always wanted to be a composer, and his piano concerto and piano pieces have been issued on CD. A slow worker, he laboured on his only opera, The Merchant of Venice, from 1968 until shortly before his death, leaving the final 24 bars unorchestrated; the score was completed by Alan Boustead.\n\nAndre Tchaikowsky - his real name was Robert Andrzej Krauthammer - was born into a Jewish family and lost his parents during the Second World War, but escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and survived two years in hiding. The experience left him traumatised, and he suffered from depression after the war; as a homosexual he was also regarded as an \"undesirable element\" in Communist Poland, and in 1958 he emigrated to Britain. There he was said to write finer English than the English themselves, and to know Shakespeare better than they did.\n\nA planned premiere at English National Opera in 1981 fell through, and after the composer's death the work lay neglected for more than thirty years. Having successfully revived The Passenger by Weinberg - another Polish-Jewish composer - in 2010, the Bregenz Festival gave the world premiere of The Merchant of Venice on 18 July 2013 as the second instalment in its series of Polish opera.\n\nThe two-hour-forty-minute performance is full of contrast, by turns suspenseful and romantic, and never flags. The music is equally varied, ranging from Berg-like intensity to medieval-sounding dances and even a borrowed leitmotif from Wagner's Ring. The story may be medieval, but the costumes and sets are contemporary, and the stylishly modern, homoerotic charge between Christopher Ainslie's countertenor Antonio and Charles Workman's tenor Bassanio is very much of our time. This could well prove to be one of the important works of the twenty-first century.\nKing International\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"EuroArts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53595475673377,"sku":"880242727084","price":4890.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0568\/8482\/2076\/files\/880242727084.jpg?v=1790481285","url":"https:\/\/cdsvinyljapan.com\/products\/880242727084","provider":"CDs Vinyl Japan Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}