Title: Chick Flick
Product review: "Arabella" is essentially theater dressed up with operatic music -- showing that Richard Strauss (and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) could reverse the "Prima la musica, poi le parole" dictum when they wanted.In this case, the theater seems to play to fantasies of vanity, intrigue, and romance that in other places would qualify as chick lit.As usual for Strauss's operas however, "Arabella" contains a variety of strong, modern psychological characterizations, a nearly unique attribute that combined with Strauss's music makes Strauss's body of operas so much more interesting than many other popular pieces in the genre.The performance and recording on this DVD are exemplary, even though the material is inherently not at the level of the masterpieces that Strauss produced so often.
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