Brescia e Amisano
Responding to Ben Miller and Michael MacMullan’s Talk of the Town contributions last week, Grand Tier Grab Bag offers two unusually interesting “Final Trios” from Der Rosenkavalier captured in-house in May 2024 — just two days apart.
La Scala had to wait until 2024 for famed conductor Kirill Petrenko to make his opera debut there with one of his specialties with a cast that included Krassimira Stoyanova as the Marschallin, Kate Lindsey (who has a much richer operatic career in Europe these days than in the U.S.) as Octavian, and Sabine Devieilhe as Sophie.
Saying goodbye rather than hello was Sir Antonio Pappano with a gala marking the end of his tenure as the Music Director of London’s Royal Opera. As the Rosenkavalier Trio often shows up on these programs, he followed tradition to lead recent Marschallin Diana Damrau alongside the “one night only” Octavian and Sophie of Aigul Akhmetshina and Lisette Oropesa.
Actually, fifteen years earlier, Oropesa sang another “one night only” Sophie at the Met during the company’s 125thAnniversary Gala. She collaborated with Deborah Voigt and Susanne Mentzer for a notoriously unhappy Strauss excerpt.
In recent years, Lise Davidsen has driven the Met’s Strauss revivals, appearing in Ariadne auf Naxos, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier. Next month the company presents its forty-two-year-old Otto Schenk production of Arabella for the first time since 2014. Its run was also planned for Davidsen, but motherhood had other ideas, so Rachel Willis-Sørensen searches for the “right man” beginning November 10 with an HD scheduled for November 22.
Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier, “Marie Theres’!”
Krassimira Stoyanova
Kate Lindsey
Sabine Devieilhe
Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Teatro alla Scala
22 May 2024
In-house
Diana Damrau
Aigul Akhmetshina
Lisette Oropesa
Conductor: Antonio Pappano
Royal Opera
24 May 2024
In-house
