Dušica Bijelić

Recorded live at the Royal Opera House, December 2012. Daniel Oren conducting Royal Opera House Orchestra and Chorus. A grand opera that dominated the stages of Europe for most of the 19th century, Robert le diable is a masterpiece. Director Laurent Pelly breathes new life into Giacomo Meyerbeer's great spectacle and audaciously entertaining moral fable, in this colourful new staging for The Royal Opera.

NABUCCO may be Verdi's first masterpiece, and not just because of that amazing Chorus of Hebrews which is justly beloved by everyone who hears it. Dramatically, this opera is tightly constructed, with believable characters in an intense conflict over values and beliefs. And Verdi's music, however early in his career, however distant from triumphs like LA FORSA DEL DESTINO or AIDA, is highly animated, revealing inner turmoil and outer passions with beauty and economy. The ensembles are especially impressive, building to satisfying heights of emotional release for the singers and the audience. And Placido Domingo is a wonder to behold and hear. Even though his original voice was baritone, which he managed to transform into a tenor voice, he doesn't SOUND like a baritone to me. B-U-T his performance is so committed, so deeply interfused with Verdi's music, so generously integrated to the younger singers around him, that the waters part.

‘Borders, Raindrops’ is a film about love, maturity, and hope, growing in a barren and abandoned landscape. The film is divided in two parts, with the protagonist, a young woman – Jagoda – connecting them as a ghostly presence, bringing hope and reconciliation within the two narratives. She is a student visiting family in the summer, living in the declining villages of former Yugoslavia, overlooking the Adriatic coast. In the first story she bonds with a cousin in his mid-thirties, who is building a house in the village, but has no one to marry and live with him. In the second, she helps a teenage cousin understand that his nation is no better than others, and that they all have to learn to live together on the recently established borders.