Technical Details: Interactive Menu in D/E Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1/ Digital Stereo Region Code: 0 Picture Format: 4:3   Running Time: 208 min.

Order No: 90016                                              upcoming! G. F. Händel Giulio Cesare Soloists: G. Pushee, R. Alexander, R. Gunn, Y. Kenny Orchestra: The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra Conductor: Richard Hickox This daringly inventive 1994 production of Händel's operatic masterpiece from The Australian Opera was hailed by press and audiences alike as a magnificent success, in which all elements combined to create a memorable evening of great opera. The production is hard-edged, and calmly post- modernistic, almost cinematic. It is blessed with a cast of singers who can perform Händel's agile music with outstanding beauty of tone and virtuosity of technique. Counter-tenor Graham Pushee is a sovereign and unforgettable Cesare. Yvonne Kenny, one of the world's leading singers of the Händel repertoire, takes the role of Cleopatra, one of Händel's greatest operatic portraits. With stylish and characterful singing from the rest of the exceptional cast and beautifully shaped playing of the original 1724 score, under the baton of Richard Hickox, this is a production full of musical delights:   "Julius Caesar remains one of Händel's greatest achievements in an output of more than 45 operas. Opera seria, the stylistic category to which it belongs, is widely considered to labour under a serious disadvantage for modern audiences: it is (falsely) held to be undramatic...So exalted is the singing in this new production and so imaginative the staging that all such doubts are irrevocably put to flight...The whole evening was a delight to the senses and the intellect, a venture which wonderously enfolded with scarcely a false step, from the first note to the last." (Sun Herald)