Andrea Bocelli-A Night in Tuscany (1997)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Opera	Booklet Biographies-Cast
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	87
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	David Amphlett
Studio Distributor	Polygram	Starring	Andrea Bocelli Nuccia Focile Zucchero Sarah Brightman
Case	Super Jewel
RPI	$36.95	Music	Marcello Rota

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Linear PCM 48/16 2.0 (1536Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	French	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    I must admit that I was not looking forward to previewing this title, since I was not all that impressed with the quality of The 3 Tenors - Paris 1998 which I recently previewed. Well, was I in for a surprise. This is a great disc. I had never heard of Andrea Bocelli until I saw this disc. He is a magnificent Italian tenor who has a voice with the remarkable quality of being able to sing classical opera and modern pop music with equal aplomb. This is in direct contrast to The 3 Tenors, who have a habit of massacring any modern music they turn their hand to. Andrea Bocelli is also wise to the fact that he is Italian, and restricts his singing to that language for the most part rather than making poor attempts at English.

    For me, the only low part of this disc is the dreadful attempted Italian singing by Sarah Brightman in the closing song. Otherwise, it is a marvellous performance all around, and well worth a listen.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 (16:9). It is not 16x9 enhanced. I wondered whether at least some of this concert was captured on film rather than on video because of the high quality of the image and because there is a Telecine credit in the end credits.

    The transfer was very sharp and clear throughout. Not as good as the best movie transfers, mind you, but more than satisfactory for this type of material. There were minor areas of excessive brightness leading to a loss of detail, but these were few and far between. Shadow detail was limited, but acceptable. Low level noise was remarkably absent from this picture.

    The colours tended to be on the muted side, but they were quite acceptable. A lot of this production was heavily blue-lit, and I expected to see a lot of chroma noise during these scenes. Mercifully, this was almost completely absent.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Video artefacts were few and far between, with minor aliasing being the worst problem in occasional shots. A very small amount of cross-colouration was present on Andrea Bocelli's scarf in the latter half of the production which presumably is an indication that at least some of this production was captured or processed in a composite format.

Audio

    Dialogue was limited to the cut scenes, and was in English. The sound is excellent on this DVD, except for early on when there was a very slight amount of distortion apparent on the vocals. This, fortunately, is rapidly corrected.

    There were no audio sync problems.

    The music was great and a pleasure to listen to.

    The surround channels were used for minimal ambience only. I elected to listen to this disc in Stereo after verifying that there was only limited musical ambience in the surrounds.

    The .1 channel was not specifically used, but the subwoofer often received signal to actively support the music.

Menu

Booklet

Cast Biographies

    The video quality is remarkably good, with only trivial problems.

    The audio quality is excellent.

    The extras are very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall