"The best of the best as­sembled on stage", wrote Ger­many’s lead­ing news­pa­per Frank­furter Allge­meine Zei­tung after the premiere of Richard Strauss’ "Der Rosen­kava­lier" at the Fest­spiel­haus Baden-Baden. In­deed, it would be hard to find a more ideal cast for this late-Ro­mantic Ro­coco pas­tiche any­where in the world.

As the Marschal­lin, stel­lar sop­rano Renée Flem­ing uses her vel­vety tones and au­tum­nal shad­ings to com­ple­ment the youth­fully lyr­ic­al and dy­nam­ic voice of Soph­ie Koch as her young lov­er Octavi­an.

Di­ana Dam­rau’s Soph­ie en­chances the trio’s sparkle with her eth­er­al high notes. Next to Franz Haw­lata as a swag­ger­ing Bar­on Ochs and the al­ways im­press­ive Franz Grundheber as Fan­in­al, the Baden-Baden pro­duc­tion rounds off its male leads with the in­ter­na­tion­al ten­or star Jo­nas Kaufmann as the "Itali­an Sing­er".

Lead­ing his Münch­ner Phil­har­monik­er, ac­claimed Ro­mantic spe­cial­ist Chris­ti­an Thiele­mann rev­els in Strauss’s lus­trous mel­an­choly and ob­tains a rarely heard trans­par­ency from the brass and wood­winds.

Bolstered by these sol­id or­ches­tral un­der­pin­nings, Her­bert Wer­nicke’s Salzburg Fest­iv­al pro­duc­tion - which also scored a great suc­cess at Par­is’ Opéra de la Bastille - has been pol­ished and trimmed here by Ale­jando Stradler. It places the cast of fab­ulous sing­ers in a sump­tu­ous set­ting of time­less el­eg­ance dom­in­ated by a play of mir­rors re­flect­ing the shift­ing emo­tions of the lead trio.