RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

2 0 4 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W J A M E S S T E I C H E N Richard Strauss would probably be pleased with the success of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD broadcast initiative, or at the least, he would not disapprove. Strauss was always a man of art and business, a combination of Bürger and Künstler. These two elements were to a certain degree mutually beneficial, for in the end Strauss saw financial success as a means of achieving eventual aesthetic independence. If Theodor Adorno and subsequent critics indicted him for a too-eager accommodation to the nascent culture industry, Strauss did not seem to care, being more concerned with making sure that composers reaped at least some of the financial benefits of the commodification of their labors and that he kept his own operas in frequent production (and collected the accompanying royalties). Strauss thus might be especially pleased by the inclusion of two of his operas – Ariadne auf Naxos and Capriccio – in the 2010–11 season of the Met’s Live in HD broadcasts. The transmission of these two works is especially felicitous in light of their metaoperatic themes: Ariadne an eighteenth-century backstager featuring a mash-up of commedia dell’arte and opera seria; Capriccio a drawing-room disquisition on the operatic ontology of words, mu- 2 0 5 R sic, and staging. It seems fitting to give these works an airing in one of the more transformative operatic media of recent memory. Strauss’s sustained interest in putting meta-operatic matters directly on the stage is the subject for a larger study; here the object at hand is the recent DVD release of Capriccio (Decca, B005QWF140) produced from the Met’s broadcast of 23 April 2011. With a libretto co-written by Strauss and Clemens Krauss, Capriccio is o≈cially designated as ‘‘A Conversation Piece for Music in One Act.’’ Despite its self-indulgent title, Capriccio is anything but frivolous, yet it is nevertheless a decidedly insider work. The setting is 1775 Paris, at the beginning of Christoph Gluck’s operatic reforms. If the o≈cial question at the heart of its argomento – which has primacy in opera: words, music, or staging? – might appear academic, the opera is also immensely pleasurable, with its opening string sextet, references to Couperin, Rameau, and Wagner , bel canto–style arias, and suite of dances. Capriccio is perhaps most readily known as a star vehicle for the Countess, who is onstage for virtually two hours straight, and it is usually only in deference to the interest and availability of a top- flight soprano that opera houses mount the work. Before the current renaissance of the work under the patronage of Renée Fleming (of which this Met production is perhaps the culmination), it was Kiri Te Kanawa who brought Capriccio back to life, among other places in San Francisco with Donald Runnicles and the San Francisco Opera, also available widely on DVD (Kultur Video B00009PY2C). (In the realm of audio recordings, the opera is available in a dream-team production with Karl Böhm conducting and Gundula Janowitz as the Countess; Deutsche Grammophon B000001GMV; 2 CDs.) Conducted by Andrew Davis, the present Met production assembles a talented and congenial cast. As opera’s leading lady in artistry and advocacy, Renée Fleming is an especially apt Countess , given the way the role in e√ect personifies the art form. As Flamand the composer and Olivier the poet, Joseph Kaiser and Russell Braun capably fill the other two corners of the love triangle : will the Countess choose the composer (music) or the poet (words)? Although equally talented as singers, their portrayals belie any meaningful truce between the warring camps of musica and parole, and seem to indicate who will eventually win the 2 0 6 S T E I C H E N Y Countess’s a√ections. The bespectacled, bowtied and nervously dour Olivier portrayed by Braun seems destined to yield to Kaiser’s taller, more dashing Flamand, and Kaiser’s soaring high register seems...