Verdi - Falstaff - Warner Music Group Germany

Recorded Live at the "Aix-En-Provence Festival"
"Falstaff" was Verdi's last opera and the climax of his career. Completed in 1893, when the composer was almost eighty, it is also the culmination of Italian comic opera. Librettist Arrigo Boito took the substance of the piece from Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives Of Windsor", but the central charakter, who embroils himself in numerous plots und dupes of love und marriage until eventually the Merry Wives get their revenge on him, is much closer to the Falstaff of "Henry IV." The jokes are at the expense not of a buffon but of a whole man, boisterous and rogish but with an underlying streak of melancholy. In this Théâtre Royal de la Monnaire de Bruxelles production, recorded during the 1987 "Aix-en-Provence Festival", the title role is sung by bass-baritone José Van Dam, a genuine actor as well as a consummate singer, as the role demands.

Libretto - Arrigo Boito
Conductor - Sylvain Cambreling
Director - Lluis Pasqual
Designer - Fabia Puigserver

Sir John Dalstaff - José Van Dame
Ford - William Stone
Alice Ford - Barbara Madra
Mistress Quickly - Livia Budai
Mistress Page - Benedetta Pecchioli
Fenton - Laurence Dale
Nannetta - Elzbieta Szmytka
Bardolph - Franco Careccia
Pistol - Mario Luperi
Doctor Caius - Ugo Benelli