TRISTAN UND ISOLDE stage director: Johannes Felsenstein ICE & STEEL stage director: Immo Karaman HÄNSEL & GRETEL stage director: Johannes Felsenstein WERTHER stage director: Robert Tannenbaum complete RING DES NIBELUNGEN stage director: Michael Schulz The RING is a coproduction with RM Arts for ARTHAUS MUSIK.
AGRIPPINA staged by Peter Lund, is the first fully independent produced opera film for Z Classic.
AIDA produced in June 2011 in Masada, Israel, is the second new title for Z Classic and is in the moment in postproduction.
All nine operas are directed for television and video by Brooks Riley. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brooks Riley, director, producer, film critic and screenwriter, is a former Senior Editor of FILM COMMENT magazine. She has written for The New York Times, The Boston Phoenix, Opera News and The Washington Post. She also worked for Jean-Luc Godard as producer at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. Ms. Riley was Executive Producer on a number of films, including MEE-SHEE THE WATER GIANT, PUCKOON, and FÜHRER EX, before devoting herself to directing opera productions for television and DVD. Her first four productions, ICE AND STEEL, WERTHER, HÄNSEL UND GRETEL and TRISTAN UND ISOLDE were released on DVD in 2008. Another five operas will be released in the near future, including the RING DES NIBELUNGEN. She also edits all the productions.
Executive producer is Rainer Mockert. Rainer Mockert worked for 8 years at UNITEL as line producer, then executive producer of many of its opera productions, before switching to feature films as executive producer and producer. In addition to his experience as feature films producer, he also produced Peter Sellar’s ground-breaking Mozart-da Ponte Trilogy, shown on PBS, as well as Sellar’s production of Händel’s GIULIO CESARE. He also produced the film version of Marc Neikrug’s THROUGH ROSES, starring Maximilian Schell and Pinchas Zukerman, directed by Jürgen Flimm as well as a documentary about Peter Sellars’s staging of Messiaen’s ST. FRANCOIS D’ASSISE in Salzburg.
