Richard Strauss's elegantly playful opera Arabella (sometimes close to operetta in style) gets a polished, light-hearted, but also serious production at the Glyndebourne Festival. Ashley Putnam gives a glowing performance in the title role and she has a strong supporting cast. John Cox's stage direction and Julia Trevelyan Oman's design create a convincing atmosphere of 19th-century Vienna (not without a dark side to provoke dramatic interest) and Bernard Haitink's conducting of the London Philharmonic is splendidly idiomatic, in the dramatic music as well as the waltz and folk dance melodies that brighten the score.

Arabella is the last libretto written for Strauss by Hugo von Hofmannsthal before his untimely death, and it has the high literary value found in all his work, although he did not live to revise Acts II and III. The story focuses on a Viennese family--Count Waldemar, his wife Adelaide and two daughters, Arabella and Zdenka. They are living in genteel poverty and hoping that Arabella, who has several suitors, will marry well and recoup their fortune. They are so poor that Zdenka has been raised as a boy because the family cannot afford to bring out two daughters in Viennese society. A properly rich suitor, Mandryka, shows up and it is love at first sight, until Zdenka confuses the situation. She is in love with one of Arabella's suitors, Matteo, sends him love letters under Arabella's name and seduces him in a darkened bedroom under the pretence that she is Arabella. Mandrkya learns of the seduction but not of Zdenka's deception, and breaks off his engagement to Arabella. There is, of course, a happy ending.

Putnam is sweet and troubled in stage presence, silvery in tone and totally charming. John Brocheler is an ardent, impetuous Mandryka and Gianna Rolandi is convincing in the rather difficult role of Zdenka. Gwendolyn Bradley makes an impressive appearance as Fiakermilli, the belle of the coachmen's ball in Act II, one of the opera's favourite features with Viennese audiences. --Joe McLellan

The last and most subtle of Richard Strauss's operas, Capriccio gets a finely nuanced interpretation in this San Francisco Opera production. A generally excellent cast is highlighted not only by the radiant presence of Kiri Te Kanawa but by the deceptively robust performance of Tatiana Troyanos in her last operatic appearance before her untimely death from cancer.

The composer described Capriccio as a "conversation piece for music in one act", and he put much effort into not only the music but the words, on which he collaborated with conductor Clemens Krauss. Krauss's verbal input was particularly appropriate in this work, because the real subject (symbolised by a conventional love triangle) is the competition (and alliance) between words and music in opera, a subject naturally close to the composer-librettist's heart. The conversation runs through the whole opera in various forms. It begins immediately after the curtain goes up, with a quarrel between the poet Olivier (Simon Keenlyside) and the composer Flamand (David Kuebler) over the respective merits of their arts. They are rivals for the hand of the widowed Countess Madeleine (Te Kanawa); she is to choose between them (i.e., between poetry and music) but she is still undecided as the final curtain descends. The intervening two hours are rich in artistic shop talk and backstage situations that will enchant sophisticated opera-lovers, as well as the love interest for the rest of us.

David Runnicles conducts with a sure sense of Straussian style; and Mauro Pagano's 18th-century set creates the right atmosphere. Keenlyside and Kuebler are eloquent and believable, Te Kanawa sweet, regal and ambiguous. Hakan Hagegard and Victor Braun give particularly vivid performances in supporting roles. --Joe McLellan

In View is meant as a companion piece to REM's best-of album, In Time, but it works well as a collection in its own right. A video history of some of the Athens, Georgia band's biggest songs, its focus is firmly on the latter part their long career, with videos from Automatic for the People ("Everybody Hurts", "Man on the Moon", "Nightswimming", "Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"), Out of Time ("Losing My Religion"), Monster ("What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"), New Adventures in Hi-Fi ("E Bow the Letter", "Electrolite"), Up ("Daysleeper", "At My Most Beautiful"), and Reveal ("Imitation of Life", "All the Way to Reno"). There are just two videos from their pre-breakthrough album Green ("Orange Crush" and "Stand"), though admittedly they shied away from making videos early in their career.

Still, nobody can fault the presentation of In View. Of course, the promos are spectacular, if occasionally too self-consciously artsy, but there's even more here. There are three live videos, recorded in Trafalgar Square, and six additional, rarely seen videos ("Tongue", "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us", "New Test Leper", "Bittersweet Me", "Lotus", "I'll Take the Rain"). Best of all, though, is the ability to watch them with or without brief, introductory interviews with the band, which give a window into REM's ongoing appeal: as talented as they are, they're still refreshingly human pop stars. --Robert Burrow