Strauss: Capriccio.(Opera Review)

[] Te Kanawa, Troyanos; Kuebler, Hagegard, Keenlyside, Braun; San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Runnicles. Kultur DVD D2900, 155 mins., subtitled

Dialogue-heavy, no action, no plot--Richard Strauss's Capriccio was an experiment that shouldn't have worked. Six characters in eighteenth-century Paris debating the balance of words and music in opera while sipping chocolate in a drawing room? It could have amounted to the stultifying operatic equivalent of My Dinner with Andre. But contemporary audiences have embraced this magical, transcendent work.

San Francisco Opera originally mounted Capriccio in 1990, in a John Cox production that originated at Glyndebourne, misguidedly setting it in the 1920s--a silly conception at odds with the libretto. For the magnificently cast 1993 revival preserved here, SFO kept Mauro Pagano's original drawing-room set but wisely hired Stephen Lawless as director and Thierry Bosquet as costume designer. They returned the story to its proper time period (1775), and the opera to its original luster.

Te Kanawa had waited to take on the Countess, a role she was born to play, until late in her stage career. Her effortless sound elegantly conveys the character's soignee charm, and she is a visual delight as she glides about the stage, in her ...