Der Rosenkavalier - The Royal Opera House Details

Sumptuously staged entertainment

If Salome and Elektra are rough earthenware pots of spicy stew, Der Rosenkavalier is a silver rimed porcelain dish of fairly cakes. Strauss?s strikingly colourful use of two keys a semitone apart during Sophie and Octavian?s love scenes adds further layers of icing to the cake. For me, the fact that Octavian is sung by a woman is rather uncomfortable ? especially in the snogging scenes. Still, Strauss needed three sopranos for the famous trio in the third act ? in fact the whole opera builds a platform for this moment. This performance is 20 years old, but with a wonderful cast and it?s great to see Sir Georg Solti. It?s ironic that the Marschallin (Kiri Te Kanawa) wistfully muses about getting older and the fact that she must give up Octavian (Anne Howells) to the younger Sophie (Barbara Bonney). After 20 years all these great singers might wistfully look back at this performance. The DVD also shows its age in being two channel sound only and the picture is a little soft edged. Never mind it?s all great fun, but too much could give you toothache ? there?s much to be said perhaps for a good spicy stew.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Not really a comedy

This is billed as a comedy but that isn't really accurate. The Marriage of Figaro is a comedy with plenty of love interest. This is a beautiful love story with some, mostly superfluous, comedy thrown in. It has to be a remarkably good production for the comedy not to feel rather tedious at times and in this production I still found the comedy mostly tedious especially in the third act while waiting for the marvellous last 15 minutes. In this production Kiri Te Kawana is a good Marschellin though not quite in the same league as Felicity Lott in the 1994 production, also on DVD. Ann Howells was very good as Octavian, I thought far better than Ann Sophie von Otter in the other production. Barbara Bonney was Sophie in both productions, I much preferred her in this one, perhaps because she was 9 years younger. She sang quite beautifully. I thought the Baron was going to be better but by the end I found him a bit tedious, it must be a very difficult part to do well. But still all the love music was absolutely beautiful, for those bits it is a wonderful, and at times very moving opera.