Opera

Yes, at the opera, when the tenor and the soprano stubbornly want to make eyes at each other, there is always a baritone or a bass to sow some discord, sometimes in vain—Osmin, Pizzarro, Caspar—, sometimes successfully—the various Mephisto, Nick Shadow Lindorf-Dapertutto-Miracle. The American bass-baritone Kevin Short offers here, accompanied by an Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille in great shape, a compendium of very, very bad characters, roles he has already sung more or less on the whole lyrical scene. Reckon that he has already performed at the MET in New York, at the operas in Chicago, Houston Los Angeles and Washington, at the Opéra Comique in Paris, in Cologne, Stuttgart, Bologna; in the festivals in Santa Fe, Bregenz, Baden-Baden, Aix-en-Provence. Not forgetting, obviously, his intense participation in the concertante field with the orchestras of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cleveland, the one from the RAI, from Radio France and so many others of that kind. Purists (who are absolutely right), fear not: Kevin Short perfectly masters the French pronunciation, as well as the German one and the Italian one. As a “bonus”, he offers a tune from his compatriot Gordon Getty, Mephistopheles to Faust. For your information, Getty indeed bears the name of the famous petroleum dynasty, but Gordon much prefers to compose music—some excellent pieces, incidentally. © SM/Qobuz