Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, performance art, and paintings. On our home page you see the latest stories. Go to the Alphalist (left navigation bar) to see our archives with hard-to-find critical reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.
Dec. 30, 2023. After 16 years of working on this website, we took a sabbatical. Now we are back. Our last review with a grade was the 2022 Rachmaninoff Concert at the Lucerne Festival. See also our recent full reviews of the new Sleeping Beauty from Christian Spuck at Opernhaus Zürich and also our recent review of the John Neumeier Anna Karenina ballet.
The publishers of fine-arts Blu-ray titles have slowed down. We have been keeping an eye on the new material. We have more basic stories and full reviews coming. Check out the new basic stories below the journal tile that divides the full reviews from the basic stories. (Today Bruckner 11: The Complete Symphonies is the most recent basic story.) Yes, we split our home page into full reviews at the top and basic stories below. We hope this will make it easier for you read the journal. (Earlier the full reviews and the new stories were mixed together, which made it much harder for readers to find the new stuff.)
During the last 16 years, we have screened 2000+ Blu-ray title fine-arts recordings that might meet our standards for hi-fi sound and HD video. We excluded nearly a third of these titles as “impostors” mostly for poor content or quality. Our screening left us now with about 1450+ line items on the Alphalist. We believe this is the only comprehensive public list anywhere that is limited to high-quality Blu-ray videos of fine-arts subjects. (If you are looking for something and it’s not on our Alphalist, check out our Excluded Titles. You may find it there and learn why we were unhappy with the title.)
Our Alphalist makes it possible for anyone anywhere to learn more than he ever could before about ballet/dance, opera, classical music, and Shakespeare plays. We have created the best available resource to you to learn about the fine-art Blu-rays you might like. The search engines are giving us good coverage. We make it easy for you to buy from good vendors. In addition to helping consumers, our reviews are also helping to set standards for making fine arts videos. These standards will help the industry produce better work and help you avoid disappointment.
So that is our story and this is our ask: If you will use our buttons to buy your discs, it will help us maintain and improve this website.