BFPA Selection of Classics
Since 2016, National Centre for the Performing Arts, China (NCPA) has been holding the International Opera Film Exhibition for five consecutive years, displaying a total of 60 films from 13 world-renowned arts institutions. The Exhibitions have brought more than 1,410 screenings to nearly 150,000 audiences in 22 cities across China. As an important showcase platform under the framework of the Beijing Forum for Performing Arts (BFPA), the Exhibition allows the BFPA members to fully present their artistic excellence and share collaborarion results for mutual benefits and win-win outcomes. In addition, the Exhibition has been actively promoting the popularization of opera and exploring the integration of technology and arts, which has been widely praised by the audience.

In thie year’s Exhibition, multiple classic titles are put on screen by well-known international arts institutions including NCPA, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Teatro Real, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, New National Theatre of Japan, Teatro alla Scala and the Metropolitan Opera.

From October 30 to the end of November, the films have been screened in cimemas in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Tianjin and other Chinese cities with effective pandemic prevention and control. And 5 screenings took place in NCPA in December.
《长征》 国家大剧院
Institutions
Composer:
YIN Qing
Librettist:
ZOU Jingzhi
Conductor:
LÜ Jia
Stage Director:
TIAN Qinxin, YANG Xiaoyang
Film Director:
HOU Keming, WANG Ying
Cast:
YAN Weiwen, WANG Haitao, WANG Hongwei, WANG Zhe
Language:
Chinese
Year:
2017
Run Time:
176 mins
Presenter:
National Centre for the Performing Arts

The Long March, which is one of the greatest events of the last century in China, is a magnificent feat that has changed history. The NCPA opera The Long March is acted out this great event, which influenced the process of Chinese revolution, in the form of an opera.
 
The whole opera has six acts of nine scenes in total, with over 30 dramatic personages and the chorus of hundreds of people. The great history of Long March ensures our today’s peaceful life, and each note of the spirit of the Long March contains the era factor and has the inspiring and shocking spiritual strength.
 
Composer:
LEi Lei
Librettist:
FENG Baiming, FENG Bilie
Conductor:
ZHANG Guoyong
Stage Director:
LIAO Xianghong
Film Director:
HOU Keming, TANG Jing
Cast:
WANG Zenan, WANG Zhe, LIU Shan, ZHAO Ming, WANG Hongyao, WANG Hexiang, LIANG Yufeng

Language:
Chinese
Year:
2018
Run Time:
147 mins
Presenter:
National Centre for the Performing Arts

The opera is adapted from a novel of the same name, published in 1959. CHEN Jing, the author of this novel, is a military writer focusing on themes of the Long March, which he personally experienced. Jinsha River tells the story happened between the Red Army trekking on the Long March and people living in Tibetan areas along the Jinsha River.
 
For this opera, composer LEI Lei has collected a lot of Tibetan music elements as source material to fully presents the charm of the Tibetan music style. Based on the novel, librettists FENG Baiming and FENG Bilie refined the storyline. Stage director LIAO Xianghong strived to restore the magnificent and imposing historical scenes of that time. To achieve this, she has visited places where the story happened, and taken historical facts and geographical features into account.
 
Composer:
Charles Francois Gounod
Libretto:
Jules Barbier and Michel Carré after Carré's Faust et Marguerite and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust Part I

Conductor:
Evelino Pidò
Stage Director:
David McVicar
Film Director:
Sue Gudd
Cast:
Angela Gheorghiu, Vittorio Grigolo, René Pape, Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Language:
French
Year:
2012
Run Time:
183 mins
Presenter:
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Gounod's Faust (1859) was one of the world's most popular operas from the 1860s to World War II, and remains a core repertory work. The story, adapted by Gounod's librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré from Carré's play Faust et Marguerite, is based on Part I of Goethe's epic poem Faust, which was a major inspiration for many composers during the 19th century and beyond. Gounod added a ballet to Act V when Faust received its first Paris Opéra staging in 1869.
 
David McVicar's wonderfully theatrical production draws insightful parallels between Faust and Gounod, a composer torn between piety and worldly and romantic success. Sets and costumes by Charles Edwards and Brigitte Reiffenstuel pay tribute to the art and architecture of 1870s Paris, and include a colourful Cabaret d'Enfer, a run-down tenement block and re-creations of a box from the Paris Opéra and the organ loft of Notre-Dame. The variety of settings mirrors the variety in Gounod's score, highlights of which include Méphistophélès's demonic aria 'Le veau d'or', Marguerite's dazzling coloratura Jewel Song, the Act IV Soldiers' Chorus and Act V's impassioned trio as Marguerite struggles to achieve salvation.
Composer:
Gaetano Donizetti
Conductor:
Daniel Oren
Stage Director:
David Alden
Cast:
Lisette Oropesa, Javier Camarena, Artur Rucinski, Roberto Tagliavini, SHI Yijie, Marina Pinchuk

Language:
Italian
Year:
2018
Run Time:
175 mins
Presenter:
Teatro Real

This production by David Alden, first commissioned for the English National Opera in 2008, sets the scene in a run-down 19th century Scottish household. The monochromatic and sparse sets work wonders in setting the asphyxiating tone. The prudish Victorian black and white costumes further accentuate the oppressive atmosphere of church, family, discipline and rigour.
 
American soprano Lisette Oropesa displays a woman who is at the complete mercy of the men in her life, men who remorselessly sacrifice her sanity for their own financial and societal objectives. Polish baritone Artur Ruciński looks and sounds a convincing Lord Enrico Ashton, Lucia’s manipulative brother. He taunts, pushes and finally molests his sister, until he gets her agreement to marry Lord Bucklaw who has the means to restore the family fortune. Javier Camarena, singing Lucia’s ill-fated lover Edgardo of Ravenswood, has emerged from a technically agile bel canto specialist to develop a voice of gobsmacking beauty, thrillingly secure high notes and delicious timbre.
 
Composer:
Leoš Janáček
Librettist:
Leoš Janáček
Conductor:
Simon Rattle
Stage Director:
Damiano Michieletto
Film Director:
Beatrix Conrad
Cast:
Camilla Nylund, Stuart Skelton, Ladislav Elgr, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Eyelyn Herlitzius

Language:
Czech
Year:
2021
Run Time:
126 mins
Presenter:
Staatsoper Unter den Linden

The rigid morals of a village community put a young woman under pressure: Jenůfa is pregnant by her lover Števa, but he rejects her and retracts his offer of marriage. Once the child is born, Jenůfa’s stepmother, the village sextoness, is worried about the young woman’s reputation as well as her own future. When Laca, another marriage suitor, offers Jenůfa his hand in marriage, the sextoness thinks that life would be better for all of them without the child...
 
Leoš Janáček’s third opera, with its echoes of folk music from the composer’s native Moravia, was his first real success and was given the sobriquet of “Moravia’s national opera”. Besides this, Janáček’s music has a special quality: while it explores psychological extremes leading to violence and infanticide, and lays bare characters’ emotions in an unsparing manner, no one is judged. His opera even ends with a final act of forgiveness -- a moral that seems virtually impossible after the numerous gruesome revelations and admissions of guilt and attests to Janáček’s humanist stance. “Jenůfa” (in Czech “Její pastorkyňa” -- “Her Stepdaughter”) has a special relationship with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden: when it premiered in Berlin in 1924, its breakthrough on the German stage was assured. Following From the House of the Dead», Katya Kabanova and the Glagolitic Mass in previous seasons, the engagement with Janáček’s chief works now continues with Jenůfa.
Composer:
Giacomo Puccini
Conductor:
ONO Kazushi
Stage Director:
Àlex Ollé
Cast:
Iréne Theorin, Teodor Ilincăi, NAKAMURA Eri, Riccardo Zanellato

Language:
Italian
Year:
2019
Run Time:
127 mins
Presenter:
The New National Theatre, Tokyo

Turandot depicts a love story of mystery. Turandot, she is a most beautiful Chinese Princess, but coldhearted. And she stipulates that any prince seeking to marry her must answer three riddles, and if he fails, he will be sentenced to death. Three poor princes have unfortunately lost their lives. Calaf, the prince of Tartary who is in exile in China, smitten with the princess's beauty, determines to win her as his bride and answers all the questions correctly. However, Princess Turandot refuses to accept defeat. Calaf generously offers Turandot a riddle of his own: if she can learn his name by dawn, he will forfeit his life. Princess Turandot captures the father of the prince and his maid Liù and extorts a confession from them by torture. Liù kills herself to keep the secret. Liù's death gives coldhearted Turandot a great shock. At dawn, Turandot still has no idea about the prince's name. Calaf forces Turandot to kiss him and melts her icy heart and finally tells her his real name. Yet Princess Turandot does not announce the prince's real name. On the contrary, she announces to the public that she will marry the prince and his name is Love.
Composer:
Giacomo Puccini
Conductor:
Riccardo Chailly
Stage Director:
Davide Livermore
Film Director:
D-wok
Cast:
Anna Netrebko, Francesco Meli, Luca Salsi
Language:
Italian
Year:
2019
Run Time:
160 mins
Presenter:
Teatro alla Scala

The painter Mario Cavaradossi is arrested in covering a political criminal. To rescue him, opera singer Tosca gives herself to Scarpia, Chief of the Police. Scarpia promises Tosca to conduct a mock execution. After getting the pass, Tosca kills Scarpia when he is not prepared. In the morning, Cavaradossi is taken to the execution ground. Unfortunately, the gun is equipped with a real bullet. The soldiers fire, and Cavaradossi falls. Tosca is so despaired that she jumps from the rampart and falls to her death.
Composer:
Antonín Dvorák
Librettist:
Jaroslav Kvapil
Conductor:
Sir Mark Elder
Stage Director:
Mary Zimmerman
Film Director:
Gary Halvorson
Cast:
Kristine Opolais, Katarina Dalayman, Brandon Jovanovich, Eric Owens, Jamie Barton

Language:
Czech
Year:
2017
Run Time:
176 mins
Presenter:
The Metropolitan Opera

Since her 2013 debut as Magda in La Rondine, Kristine Opolais has become familiar to Met audiences in the works of Giacomo Puccini. In 2016, the soprano’s performances as the title heroine of Dvořák’s Rusalka allowed her to show off another of her signature roles. In a new production by Mary Zimmerman, this classic tale of a water sprite yearning to become a human to find love starts as a whimsical fairytale but quickly develops into a heartbreaking tragedy. On the podium, Sir Mark Elder leads a stirring account of Dvořák’s score, drawing a rich palette of musical colors from the Met Orchestra. Tenor Brandon Jovanovich gives a virile performance as the infatuated Prince, alongside bass Eric Owens as Rusalka’s father, the Water Gnome, and Jamie Barton as the devilish sorceress Ježibaba.