Don Georgevich

The central facts of this brilliant performance are the conductor's vision and energy, expressed through a virtuoso orchestra and a cast carefully selected for theatrical as well as musical skills. The feeling of unrelenting pressure in the music seems to be an externalization of Don Giovanni's compulsions, which are only thinly veiled by his aristocratic manner and Mozart's mellifluous but intensely dramatic music. Riccardo Muti's tempos are often fast, but not so fast as to interfere with the fine nuances of dramatic expression in the orchestra and the singers, and he makes the gritty realities underlying the often smooth surface of the words and music intensely clear at every point.

For some reason, Daniel Barenboim's recordings of the Mozart-Da Ponte masterpieces have been overlooked. All three have splendid casts - and among them, this may be the least spectacular, but it is nonetheless a wonderful performance. Joan Rodgers has a gorgeous voice, and sings Zerlina with radiant and womanly warmth - no voce infantile here, thank the gods. It's a pity she hasn't recorded more. She is, fortunately, in Barenboim's two other Mozart-Da Ponte operas, singing her heart out as Susanna and Despina. Furlanetto has an interesting take on the role of the Don. He usually sings Leprello, but here he sings the part of Don Giovanni with a rather unique interpretation.

Maazel's performances appear not only on audio recordings but on film - he was the conductor for film versions of Don Giovanni (Joseph Losey's award-winning adaptation, mentioned below), Carmen and Franco Zeffirelli's interpretation of Otello.
Although primarily known as a conductor, Maazel was no stranger to composition himself, arranging material from Wagner's Ring Cycle into a 75-minute suite, The Ring Without Words, and composing an opera based on George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four; and as if this were not enough, he was also an accomplished violinist (see below for a recording of his performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons)…

This is a review of the 'live' Mitropoulos recording from Salzburg. Although it is in mono sound the sense of perspective is actually better than in many stereo efforts. Yes sometimes voices recede further than is ideal but that is to be expected in the theatre. The audience is unobtrusive between numbers. The stage noise is generally very low frequency so does not obscure the music.

As early as 1761, a year before his masterpiece Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck largely renewed another musical genre, the ballet, with his adaptation of a work by Molière for Viennese audiences: Don Juan. Another work, Sémiramis, followed a year later. These two works are innovative in that they offer, for the first time, a coherent narrative in which all the resources of the orchestra are put at the service of expressiveness. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations bring out all the nuances of these scores, reminding us that a quarter of a century before Mozart, the stages of Europe were treated to all the evocative power of music by another outstanding figure: Christoph Willibald Gluck.

This is a review of the 'live' Mitropoulos recording from Salzburg. Although it is in mono sound the sense of perspective is actually better than in many stereo efforts. Yes sometimes voices recede further than is ideal but that is to be expected in the theatre. The audience is unobtrusive between numbers. The stage noise is generally very low frequency so does not obscure the music.