Renee Fleming to Star in Met Saturday Matinee Broadcast of Strauss' "Capricco" on April 23

Renee Fleming
St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Richard Strauss’ Capriccio on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. You may also listen to a live stream of the broadcast. Approximate running time 2 hours, 16 minutes; performed without intermission.

The Met web site says:

On Opening Night of the 2008–09 season, Renée Fleming dazzled audiences when she sang the final scene of Strauss’ wise and worldly meditation on art and life. Now she performs the entire work, in which the composer explores the essence of opera itself. Joseph Kaiser and Sarah Connolly also star, and Andrew Davis conducts.

In a review titled "Words or Music: Why Choose?" in the March 29, 2011, edition of the New York Times, Anthony Tomissini said:

Strauss described Capriccio, with a libretto by the composer and the conductor Clemens Krauss, as a “conversation piece for music.” It is certainly a chatty opera. Countess Madeleine, a young widow who lives in a chateau outside Paris with her brother, the Count, is being courted by the composer Flamand and the poet Olivier. It is her birthday, and for the occasion Flamand has written her a string sextet, and Olivier a sonnet. The love triangle becomes an allegory for an aesthetic debate about whether music or words are more important, on their own terms or when the two arts are combined.

This realistic production by John Cox, introduced in 1998, moves the setting from the 1770s to the 1920s. For this revival, new costumes and décors were designed by Robert Perdziola. The idea of the updating was to make the aesthetic issues seem more pertinent to opera today, and it works, though you have to accept the talk among the characters about their reactions to the latest opera by Gluck.

For the Countess, being courted by two artistic men is both flattering and threatening. There is no reason to choose between words and music. But between her two suitors she must make a choice. Confronted by their ardor, she realizes how arbitrary such important choices are.

The opera is presented here without a break, as Strauss intended it, lasting about 2 hours 20 minutes. The Countess is onstage almost the entire time. Ms. Fleming, looking radiant, brought verbal crispness and coy charm to the Countess’s conversational singing but grabbed every chance to let her voice bloom in the fleeting melodic bits.

The High Definition transmission of Capricco will be presented at AMC Esquire 7, 6706 Clayton Road; St. Louis Mills 18; 5555 Saint Louis Mills Boulevard; AMC Chesterfield 14, 3000 Chesterfield Mall; and AMC Showplace Edwardsville 13, 6333 Center Grove Road, Edwardsville, Illinois. Click here to buy tickets.