Enormously popular and influential in its time, Meyerbeer's L'Africaine has become a rarity--the conventions of grand opera which it embodies so thoroughly are only familiar as adapted by Verdi and Wagner, so this work usefully reminds us of how radical they were. Meyerbeer and his librettist Scribe give us a five-act plot full of confrontations and threats of death, a shipwreck and the suicide of the Indian heroine Selika and her rejected suitor by inhaling the poisonous aromas of a deadly tree. The expedition of Vasco Da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope and up to the spice ports of India becomes less a story about the crusade for profit and more a matter of messy triangular love affairs. Heavy fathers, Brahmin priests and Grand Inquisitors are handled with much facility and no intensity. What L'Africaine really amounts to is a singers' display piece, and the two principals here--Shirley Verrett as Selika and Placido Domingo as Vasco--are entirely up to its demands. Domingo reminds us that Vasco's Act 4 aria "Oh Paradis" was for decades a standard tenor showstopper. The other principals, Ruth Ann Svenson and Justino Diaz, are entirely admirable and Marco Arena and the San Francisco Opera give the work as a whole both the grandeur it certainly possesses and rather more subtlety than one might have expected.

On the DVD: The DVD, presented in 4:3 ratio, and in PCM stereo, has no features apart from instructions and subtitles in French, German, English and Spanish. This failure to provide extras, or even an especially informative leaflet, becomes especially regrettable with a work whose conventions are now far out of the operatic mainstream. --Roz Kaveney

As grand opera goes, few examples of the form have the inherent grandeur of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. The dramatic backdrop is Mérimée's account of the 16th-century St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of thousands of French Calvinists under the Catholic regime. The trick, insofar as there is one, is the way in which the attendant upheaval is reflected in the smallest detail of the lives of the main protagonists. This Berlin Opera production of 1991 carries this process several stages further, embedding--and there really is no other word to describe the thoroughness of the process--the narrative into an indeterminate, hyper-condensed 20th-century setting. While this approach has its own pitfalls, such as the silent "pre-overture" which proposes an unsubtle comparison between the oppression of the Catholics and the persecution of the Jews in wartime Germany, it would be churlish to let them detract from what is a robust and highly memorable performance of this sometimes unfashionable opera. The usual trailer for other Arthaus DVDs is appended. --Roger Thomas