Product Description
Featuring:
Renee Fleming (Countess Madeleine), Joseph Kaiser (Flamand), Morten Frank Larsen (Count), Russell Braun (Olivier), Sarah Connolly (Clairon), Peter Rose (La Roche), Olga Makarina, Barry Banks (Italian Singers)
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, John Cox (director)
Capriccio examines the age old debate of what is superior – music or poetry. In the opera this is manifests itself through the widowed Countess struggling to decide between two potential loves - the composer Flamand (a composer) or Olivier (a poet). Her indecision reaches its climax in the famously beautiful final scene - one of Strauss's most passionate soliloquies for soprano, set to music of rapturous beauty - yet the opera leaves the audience on an eternal cliffhanger, as her final decision is never revealed!
John Cox's Met production transports the opera from its original eighteenth century setting to the elegance of 1920’s Paris – an era beautifully captured in Robert Perdziola's acclaimed designs Under the baton of conductor Sir Andrew Davis, Renée Fleming leads a superb cast of Straussians, which includes Russell Braun and Joseph Kaiser as the poet and composer respectively. Morten Frank Larsen stars as the countess’ brother alongside the 'theatricals' - British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, tenor Barry Banks. Peter Rose appears as the ‘director’ La Roche.
"The performance over all, sensitively conducted by Andrew Davis and featuring a winning cast, made an excellent case for this Strauss curiosity, his final opera, which had its premiere in Munich in 1942 in the midst of World War II...Ms. Fleming’s voice was plush and alluring; her phrasing noble." - New York Tumes
