THE TOILET SITUATION

·27 min·1 clip

Richard Kine says he is making a solo recording in March 2026 with orchestra, choir, and no label support.

It starts loose. The setup takes a while, the mic finally cooperates, and Kine checks in from Paris on Saturday, October 11th, tired but glad to be there. The jet lag has him sideways. He jokes about white wine and a benzo, then immediately tells listeners not to copy him, which pretty much sets the room temperature. Then rehearsal takes over. One week into Donation de Faust at the Théâtre de Champs-Élysées, he calls the operation first class and sounds happy in the plainest way: the work is good, the room is good, and he knows it. The harder part is the recording. Kine lays out the classical business as he sees it. Tenors and sopranos can still get orchestra-backed studio projects. Basses, many baritones, and mezzos are often out of luck unless an old contract keeps them in the game. So he is paying for it himself. He does not sell that as genius entrepreneurship. He says the project will lose money, probably all of it, and treats that as the price of making the thing he wants to make. The scale keeps getting heavier. Piano would be cheaper, but the pieces in his head want full orchestra, a maestro, and a men's choir. He admits the ensemble is not the Berlin Phil, then shrugs off the comparison because the group he picked is strong and knows how to record. That is the ethic of the episode. If the institutions will not fund the record, he would rather build it himself than sand it down. Near the end, Kine turns to the podcast: almost four million podcasts exist, most never reach a thousand total downloads, and top three percent still means somewhere inside the first 240,000. Then comes the flex, kept just modest enough: he says this is the number one classical podcast because listeners keep coming back.

As heard by us

A Paris rehearsal diary that becomes a blunt look at the economics of recording opera.

Richard Kine moves through this Paris episode from jet lag to rehearsal life and the practical realities of making an opera recording. He is there for Donation de Faust rehearsal at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees, and he is clear that the project uses a full orchestra because he…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want opera backstage math, not polished opera-speak.

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