Catch an Opera at Home

摘要

We're barreling along in Act II of Berlioz's The Trojans. Troy is in flames. The Greeks are rampaging. As conductor John Eliot Gardiner whips the orchestra to a boil, the proph-etess Cassandra (Anna Caterina Antonacci) soars into an aria of despair and defiance, urging the other Trojan women to kill themselves. But hold on. Let's take a moment to hear how director Yannis Kokkos sees this scene. (Cassandra's "vision of fatality," he says, achieves for Troy "a kind of revenge by immolation.") Next, let's cut to Gardiner. (Conducting this music, he says, is "so deeply moving because [Berlioz] does everything that the conductor needs for him.") O.K. Now back to the battle.