About us
Founded in 1994 by François Duplat, Bel Air Media is an independent production company specialized in the production of performing arts (operas, ballets, concerts, theatre) recordings for television and video. Its activity also includes documentary films, revolving around the arts and cultural subjects in general.
Over the past decades, Bel Air Media has produced over four hundred prestigious programs for television channels worldwide, including ARTE, France Télévisions and Mezzo in France, ZDF, ARD, BR in Germany and ORF in Austria, Classica in Italy, NHK in Japan, BBC in the United Kingdom, Thirteen/ Wnet in the United States, or Kultura in Russia. The company thus earned the trust and worked with the most prestigious European opera houses, such as the Opéra national de Paris, the Comédie Française, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (Paris), the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Zurich Opera House, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint-Petersburg, the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, the Berliner Staatsoper, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Théâtre royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Teatro Real of Madrid, and of world-reputed lyric festivals, such as the Rencontres musicales d’Evian, Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Salzburg Festival, or the Arena di Verona.
These successful collaborations, in turn, allowed Bel Air Media to develop fruitful relationships with some of today’s greatest artists, and to follow and broadcast the evolution of their career. Among them we can name stage directors Peter Brook, Luc Bondy, Olivier Py, André Engel, Peter Mussbach, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Ariane Mnouchkine, Romeo Castellucci, Laurent Pelly and Patrice Chéreau; choreographers Pina Bausch, Roland Petit, Bill T. Jones, Yuri Grigorovich, Nacho Duato, Alexander Ekman; conductors William Christie, Marc Minkowski, René Jacobs, Valery Gergiev, Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Daniel Barenboim, Vladimir Jurowski; dance companies like the Bolshoi Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Staatsballett Berlin, the Royal Swedish Ballet…
Since 2010, Bel Air Media coproduce with the Bolshoi Theatre and Pathé Live: “The Bolshoi Ballet Live in Cinema”. Specifically shot for the big screen, filmed in high definition and 5.1 sound with no less than ten cameras, these broadcasts provide a unique opportunity for the audience to enjoy an otherwise impossible proximity with the artists thanks to interviews and backstage footage, and allows them to sneak a peek behind the stage of one of the largest ballet houses in the world. Thanks to the most advanced video-transmission technology, these performances are now broadcasted live by satellite and simultaneously in over a thousand cinemas and across thirty-six countries. Since 2016, Bel Air Media and Pathé Live also produce live broadcasts from the Comédie-Française in Paris.
Bel Air Classiques
In 2004, Bel Air Media founded its DVD & Blu-ray edition branch, Bel Air Classiques, and releases about twelve titles every year. Several releases from Bel Air Classiques’ catalogue (available on www.belairclassiques.com) received prestigious awards from all over the world, such as the “Diapason d’or” of the year, the BBC Magazine Music Award, the International Opera Award for Best Recording, the Gramophone Classical Music Awards, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplatten Kritik…