Jaques Offenbach La vie parisienne DVD

Plot: While looking for an apartment, Jeanne, a beautiful young Parisienne, encounters Paul, a mysterious American expatriate mourning his wife's recent suicide. Instantly drawn to each other, they have a stormy, passionate affair, in which they do not reveal their names to each other. Their relationship deeply affects their lives, as Paul struggles with his wife's death and Jeanne prepares to marry her fiance, Tom, a film director making a cinema-verite documentary about her.

Here's a chance for you to hear the talents of Jose Carreras without those other two tenors sharing the limelight. The Very Best of Jose Carreras is a full two discs of opera scenes and arias from the Italian and French Romantic repertoire. Some of the scenes are extracted from complete opera recordings made in the '70s and '80s, which means there are a couple of jarring fade outs after Carreras' arias. The set contains some of the most popular tenor arias, such as "Vesti la giubba," "Nessun dorma," and "Salut! Demeure chaste et pure," but there are also lesser-known gems like "O paradis" (from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine) and "Vainement, ma bien-aimee" (from Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys). Even if Carreras' voice isn't quite as smooth and supple as other tenors', he still has a way with the lyric repertoire, which is best on the second disc, beginning with selections from Verdi's Don Carlo. He also brings a vividness to his characters, which comes through even on record. Some of the more entertaining scenes are from Pagliacci with Renata Scotto, conducted by Riccardo Muti; and from Offenbach's La Perichole with Teresa Berganza, conducted by Michel Plasson. The only drawback to this collection is the uneven engineering of the selections, which is to be expected in a compilation; it is at times frustrating to hear the vocalists drowned out by the orchestra.