Opera at home

Reviews of CDs and DVDs

CDs

TRI SESTRY

EÖTVÖS

Oehms OC986

Peter Eotvos’ 1998 opera Tri sestry, based on Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, is here recorded live at Oper Frankfurt in 2018. It takes fragments of the original Russian play and recombines them in a non-linear way to create a prologue and three “Sequences” from the points of view of Irina, Andrei and Mascha respectively. The recombination is complex enough for the accompanying booklet to contain a table mapping Chekhov’s scene order to Eotvos’. There’s no libretto in the CD package so even with flipping between the fairly detailed synopsis and the track listing, it’s hard to figure out who is singing, or about what. No doubt this was much clearer when watching the staged production.

Matters are not made any easier by giving all the female roles to male singers. The sisters and Natascha are sung by countertenors while the nanny Anfisa is a bass. This is fine, except that a