Night With Handel, A

When I bagged this disc for review I was expecting a disc of all the famous Handel classical pieces like Water Music, etc, but instead it's actually a documentary for Channel 4 in the UK about Handel's operas. Never afraid of a challenge, I plunged into the disc to see how well Warner had pulled off the DVD mastering.

The documentary runs 51 minutes and isn't an especially gripping presentation. The DVD is reasonably well designed; you get basic subtitles so you know what the singers are on about, and you can choose to listen to the music by itself (Arias Only) without distracting video or voiceovers. Unfortunately, while you can pause the audio in this section, you can't fast forward or rewind, which makes it rather limiting!

You expect a certain look from British documentaries: a slight blue cast, everybody looks a bit ill and unhappy, and the narrator always has to appear on camera and look suitably serious. The DVD is non-anamorphic and in a 1.78:1 (or thereabouts) widescreen ratio, as is common practice with recent British programs. As we're dealing with a video source here and not film, there are no film artifacts to be concerned with. I would classify the picture as being slightly soft, and shadow detail and colour purity aren't as satisfactory as images shot on film and transferred with care. The colours just don't 'glow'. However, the focus of this disc (pardon the pun) is on the sound, not the picture.

The documentary is in 2-channel Dolby Digital, and the Arias Only section is presented in 48kHz stereo PCM. The Dolby Digital is actually surprisingly listenable - it's survived the lossy encoding very well. The only real problem I have with the music is that it's been recorded in a very 'modern' way - that is, too many mics, and the orchestra has no sense of being in a real hall. A real orchestra captured from two or four mics will have a darker, more distant quality than this DVD, with a sense of depth and height to the stereo image, both of which are missing here.

It seems a wasted opportunity that the audio is in two channels only. DVD provides for 5.1 channels, and orchestral music sounds wonderful in surround (I have some wonderful Mozart in DTS to prove it!), so why not make the extra effort?

There's not much in the way of extras bar the choice of three spoken languages and subtitles (English, French and Dutch) and the ability to listen to the music without the documentary. The disc is playable on every region except the Region 1.

This documentary might be interesting enough to while away a boring Sunday evening when you've just had your wisdom teeth out, but you're not going to want to watch it more than once. The only part of the disc really worth the money is the Aria Only section, which, once selected, basically acts like a CD, except that you lost most of the functionality of a normal CD! I'd suggest that Handel fans and opera buffs would probably be better off just buying a decent CD of his music. Approach with caution.