Rating: 
Summary: Grim and surrealistic staging destroyed enjoyment of music.
Review: If you have enjoyed the romantic settings and colorful costumes of other production of Tales of Hoffmann, this version is not for you. The whole opera is set in a grim, grey insane asylum of some sort with drab costumes and no furnishings beyond a few chairs and a ubiquitous rolling cart. The vocal perfromances are quite good, and the use of black artists very appropriate and interesting, but you may find yourself distracted by questions such as: why are so many of the characters bald, or why do they keep exchanging coats? If you enjoy really avaunt guarde productions, you may like this. Myself, I'm going to look for a more traditional staging.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but who needs it
Review: If you love the opera and want to see it in any of the dozens of versions that are more or less what Offenbach had in mind, do NOT buy this DVD. If you're interested in the opera and ready to spend a few dollars on a very different version (among many other changes, much abbreviated), you can take a risk on this. But my guess is that very few people will watch it more than once.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but it's not Offenbach
Review: If you think that you are getting Offenbach's opera, think again. This modernistic production which seems to be set in a madhouse bears only the faintest relationship to Les Contes D'Hoffman. (Hence the title Des Contes.) If I didn't hear the music I would think I was watching a staging of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Marat/Sade. It remined me of a production of Rienzi I saw where everyone was clad in camoflauge? Where were the visuals to go with the grand music? And where in this version of Offenbach is the charm, the beauty, and the humor that goes with this music? Is it really doing composers a service to mask their intentions and create incongruous crap in the name of invention and eschew convention? I felt as one who sits down to dine on Beef Wellington on fine china and is served hamburger on paper plates.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed, misguided production, but beautifully sung
Review: It is a shame that this video recording is the only visual representation of Michael Kaye's outstanding new edition of Offenbach's masterpiece currently available. As most are aware, this great (and I truly mean great) work was orphaned even before its birth, and since then has survived and been trundled out in mutilated versions, with much of Offenbach's original music cut and some numbers added by other hands. It is perhaps a tribute to the work's masterful score and fascinatingly literate libretto that, even in this form, it has gained immense popularity all over the world. The almost miraculous discoveries in the 80's and 90's of hundreds of pages of original Offenbach manuscript have now made it possible to finally re-construct, as best we can, what Offenbach's original intentions were, and has made it even more vital than ever that this work be seen not as some flouncy-bouncy fantasy opera with pretty tunes, but an immense music drama, on a par with Bizet's "Carmen" or Berlioz' "Les Troyens".
So then, why use Kaye's edition and then almost simultaneously de-construct it by truncating it (omitting half of the fourth and the entirety of the fifth acts)and pairing it with a production that counters Offenbach's vision at every step? While I'm not against a fresh look at a masterpiece, this production provides, in my opinion, nothing new to set one thinking, and seems to toss out all the main points of the work: the Muse's struggle for Hoffman's love, the sacrifice of mortal happiness for artistic immortality, the fact that "love makes a man great, but tears make him immortal". This is all gone in this production. And the omission of Offenbach's original finale/apotheosis which had languished for almost a hundred years, completely unknown and unheard, is a crime.
Not that I'm longing for the old-style, glitzy Met productions that saw the work as nothing more than a vehicle for an outing of star singers. It is time to re-think this work, but on Offenbach's terms. This work has suffered enough, it is time it was vindicated by a thoughtful production which explores its depth but does no dis-service to the original.
The singing, however, is excellent; but if that's all that interests, I would suggest buying Nagano's recording of the opera which features many of the same cast members (with the welcome addition of Alagna as Hoffman) and presents the score in its entirety.
Rating: 
Summary: A Fascinating Experiment
Review: Most of the viewers comments have their own truth about them. I blame some of the problem on "sheer" shock, since the producers of the Video decided to share very little with the viewer. Indeed,anybody might have easily missed the change of title, or not fully comprehend the brief "blurb" on the back of the cover. This production should have been explained, as it undoubtedly would have been were it a CD with booklet with libretto.Obviously, this production has its flaws, but it appears an honest effort to reproduce the almost unknown world of German romanticism, often mad and desperately insane. Setting the tales in an asylum is brilliant,although it hardly is a Tales of Hoffman immortalized by the Offenbach opera most of us know. Nor was anybody warned that it represents the opera score in a different phase of its development. There has to have been some competition between production and music director. This item does not reproduce the tales but captures the spirit of them; it works marvellously, in the end. The traditional version is too romantic, but nobody outside of Germany understood that original and frightening sense of much of German romanticism. Last evening I saw a production of Berg's Wozzeck, composed in 1925 to a play that premiered in 1837. This awe-inspiring and modern play (to our minds) was perfectly captured almost a century later by Alban Berg. The original Woyzeck is almost post Freudian and post Marxist. Thank God nobody in the nineteenth century attempted to set it to music. It contained a vision that romanticism in any other country couldn't conceive of. In a similar way the world of E.T.A. Hoffmann was in advance of its times and probably his tales would better be turned into an opera a century later, like Wozzeck. Jacques Offenbach got there ahead of time, and even in the version we are used to, captured much of that insane dream, but, ultimately it was literally "dolled" up. Would that somebody recomposed the opera to suit its sheer modernity. What apparently is the original score by Offenbach probably works better for this interpretation. Once you penetrate at least the mystery,the production deserves a good "A" for its singularity. It is entirely enthralling, and I need not comment about the singing which everybody agrees is mostly wonderful. There is more to German Romanticism than the world of Nietzsche and Wagner. To those who are shocked, for the wrong reasons, their's be the loss. Somewhere, somebody mentioned the controversial production by the Kirov people of Prokoviev's Fiery Angel. In this case, not knowing any competition, I loved every moment of it. I suspected some perverse originality but did not know the interpretation was a source of controversy.
Rating:
Summary: The production is awful.
Review: Not only did I not like the production, I was offended by it. It really took away from so much of what I like about Hoffman. The music was wonderful but I agree with the other reviewers, I would rather have heard it on a CD than watch it. I will get rid of my copy when I can get another Hoffman on DVD. I thought the singer that sang Hoffman looked like Andy Kaufmann but sang like a god. I also enjoyed Olympia's voice a lot.
Rating:
Summary: attn: classical fundamentalists!
Review: the classical fundamentalists are as annoying and as harmful as christian fundamentalists.
why?
because, like the religious fundamentalists the 'classical crowd'
has become so conservative, so insistent on the 'sacred word' that they are, in affect, killing the future of artmusic.
and that, is what classical music and jazz really is; artmusic.
interpetation is an art within itself.
the plague that was toscanini had devestating affects that we are still struggling to recover from today. and the result is that classical music is in its death throes.
where are the current composers?
oh, we have knussen, salonen, saaarhio making small dents, but that is all.
it was less than a mere hundred years ago that debussy, ravel, stravinsky, milhuad, bartok, shoenberg, berg, and webern caught our attention.
but, that is past.
no one today can make that type of impact and the fault lies at the very feet of the medium's 'fans'.
in film and theatre we have seen new retellings of hamlet, midsummers nights dream and etc, but even that group's conservative adherents pale in comparison to the plethora of conservatives in classical music.
numerous complaints spring up every time a leonard bernstein or pierre boulez type interpets a piece in a subjective light, although even karajan,despite what is claimed, was a subjectivist.
today it seems only the incresingly dull levine is 'acceptable'.
mahler, kubelik, and klmeperer all attached themselves to new music and all met obstacles in the toscanini corrupted states.
and the recording industry is replete with play it safe thinkers as well.
do we need another beethoven cycle?
even boulez is now recording much recorded music.
peter sellars and group did some innovative films of the mozart duponte operas years ago. those have long been out of circulation and its doubtful that they will be seeing the light of day any time soon.
barenboim and kupfer did a superb, abstract parsifal and ring cycle that have inexplicably vanished.
barenboim and chereau did a (by all accounts) startling wozzeck that has never made its way to the states.
yet we can find any levine la boheme or magic flute on dvd, vhs, laser disc, etc in any tower records.
and still, the sales, even on levines output is miniscule.
mainly because theyre dull, flat, and unimaginative.
if the recording industry and 'fans' could find it within themsleves to take a chance on new music and new interpetations on the old chestnuts, then perhaps the death of artmusic would not be so imminent.
but, from the reactions i have seen on amazon towards innovative interpetations (like this one), i am not optimistic.
Rating:
Summary: How bad can a good opera be!
Review: The story has no relationship to the original. Mostly the action is composed of bodies flopping all over the stage, supposedly as inmates of an insane asylum. The singing is excellent but the view is sickening. At least one very important aria (Diamond shine) is left out. To say that I didn't like it would be a great understatement. As a matter of fact, I hated it! Any questions?
Rating:
Summary: How bad can a good opera be!
Review: The story has no relationship to the original. Mostly the action is composed of bodies flopping all over the stage, supposedly as inmates of an insane asylum. The singing is excellent but the view is sickening. At least one very important aria (Diamond shine) is left out. To say that I didn't like it would be a great understatement. As a matter of fact, I hated it! Any questions?
Rating:
Summary: From an opera lover
Review: This DVD recording is a disgrace! The exceptionally well played and sung beautiful melodies of Offenbach are "visualized" by horribly perverse and morbid events on stage. The whole play is twisted,all the original ideas are taken out and replaced by meaningless and tasteless decadent stupidities. And all this in the name of "modern opera staging". If you like conventional or even reasonably and tastefully modernized 19th century opera, don't even touch this title. I hope that some recognized record company will soon release a proper and enjoyable version of this lovely opera. Ivan Fenyves (65)
Johannesburg - Republic of South Africa
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