The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass"s latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott"s spectacular production is worthy of Disney"s own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture. In the pit conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer"s hypnotically beautiful music, gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer"s operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk"s novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney"s troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.