Tonight: Magic Moments of Opera, Ballet and Concert (2001) (NTSC)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Discography-DVD Catalogue Booklet
Rating
Year Of Production	2001
Running Time	85:09
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Hermann Enkemeier
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Agnes Baltsa Barbara Bonney Margot Fonteyn Andrea Bocelli Kiri Te Kanawa Luciano Pavarotti Jose Carreras Bryn Terfel Cecilia Bartoli Herbert Von Karajan Leonard Bernstein George Solti Anne-Sophie Mutter
Case	Flexbox
RPI	?	Music	Giuseppe Verdi Richard Wagner Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Video (NTSC)		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Frame	Audio Linear PCM 48/16 2.0 (1536Kb/s) Audio Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Audio Dolby Digital 5.0 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	Varies
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	480i (NTSC)
Original Aspect Ratio	Varies	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French German Spanish Chinese	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Well, onto the nitty gritty - the bad news is that this reviewer isn't going to even attempt to describe each excerpt in detail and this would obviously be inaccurate considering the short snippets available - the good new is that all but seven of the features have been reviewed in detail on this web-site and links are provided, in the table below, along with salient features of each piece. Rest assured that there is much of interest in even these brief samples; the sensitive, inimitable style of von Karajan in Verdi's Requiem (spot the clean-shaven Pavarotti!), the wonderful duo of a very youthful appearing Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras in Making of West Side Story and the good-natured horseplay between the Three Tenors before the needs of commerce ruined the magic!

Video

    The standard of video varies widely from the appallingly pixelated Bernstein Making of West Side Story to the near-reference quality of the recently released Sacred Arias. Video quality doesn't always correlate with age of production. Phillip's Swan Lake (1966) is surprisingly colourful and free from noise, the classic 1980 release of Gotterdammerung is of near reference quality, but the much more recent Le Nozze di Figaro (1993) has distracting chroma noise and an irritating interlaced appearance.

    All of the Deutsche Grammophon releases are in 1.33:1 and, horror of horrors, three of these are letterboxed - truly the worst of both worlds !! Only Sacred Arias and Rossini's La Cenerentola benefit from a 1.78:1 16x9 enhanced format.

    In typical austere Teutonic tradition, none of the Deutsch Grammophon titles have subtitles. You get your regulation 1.33:1 box, 2 channel stereo and that's yer lot mate! All of the Decca releases, save Three Tenors, have English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese subtitles whilst in the Philip's stable, only Wagner's Gotterdammerung has English and French subtitles.

    The disc is a single layer DVD-5 and hence has no transition point.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    All of the sound tracks, in their various manifestations are of good quality. Naturally, some of the older analogue recordings, such as Swan Lake, have audible hiss, but this all adds to the antique feel of the recordings. Some of the later recordings, such as the Dolby Digital 5.0 version of Andrea Bocelli, are truly exquisite, confirming the virtues of this format for hi-fidelity classical music despite reservations voiced by the ceramic, needle and hiss lobby.

    Dialogue clarity was good in all the recordings and I could pick no problems with audio sync.

    Surrounds were infrequently used and only really sprang to life in La Cenerentola where I thought they added an uncomfortable degree of reverberation to the mix.

    The subwoofer, despite 6 tracks featuring the .1 LFE channel, remained inaudible during the whole DVD which really wasn't a great loss.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Booklet

    This is a useful 18 page release with photos, single page self-promoting blurb in English, German, French and Spanish and most importantly details of each performance and the DVD from whence they were taken from.

    This multi-region DVD would appear to be prepared for global release although I couldn't find any other regional reviews for comparison.

    The video quality varied from reference quality (Bocelli) to awful (Bernstein).

    All the soundtracks were good. The quality of two of the stereo PCM releases were superb (Il trovatore and Le nozze di Figaro) and two of the surround mixes ably demonstrated the advantages of this format for presentation of a complex operatic soundstage (Three Tenors and Cenerentola).

    The extras were just about non-existent although the accompanying booklet was very useful for reference.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall