Le Nozze di Figaro Vienna

Karl Bohm’s name carries with it immense respect among musicians and connoisseurs in our most sophisticated markets, particularly for opera where his “gods” were Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss. Deutsche Grammophon proudly brings together for the first time his complete vocal recordings for the label – including the star-studded 1968 ‘Le nozze di Figaro’; the legendary ‘Zauberflöte’ from 1964 with Fritz Wunderlich and Roberta Peters; Bohm’s two recordings of the ‘Missa solemnis’, two Rosenkavaliers, three recordings of Ariadne auf Naxos, Wagner’s Hollander & Tristan … and one disc of new-to-CD recordings. Beautiful packaging and presentation.

Volume 7 of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s Mozart piano concertos survey with Gábor Takács-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata features two of the late concertos – Nos 24 and 25 – along with a spirited reading of the Overture to Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). Concerto No. 24 was written whilst Mozart was busily composing Le nozze di Figaro, between October 1785 and the première, in Vienna, in May 1786. One of only two piano concertos in a minor key, this extraordinary work possesses many unusual features, including the deliberately ambivalent tonality of the opening melody, which uses all twelve tones of the scale (a pre-echo of serialism??!).

The program on this release by baritone Matthew Rose is innovative and useful in a couple of different ways. First, although performers have sometimes tried to bring 18th century opera to life by programming arias written for specific singers, this has usually been applied to countertenors. They were generally the stars, it's true, but they weren't the only ones. The Italian comic baritone Francesco Benucci was one of the leads of Joseph II's Italian opera company, the original Figaro, and the original Leporello in Don Giovanni in the Vienna premiere (the second production).

Lucia Popp (born Lucia Poppová) entered the Academy in Bratislava primarily to study drama. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano but her musical lessons developed a high upper register to such a degree that her professional debut was as Queen of the Night in Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte in Bratislava. In 1963 Otto Klemperer heard her and she duly recorded this role with him in 1971. Also in 1963 Herbert von Karajan invited her to join the State Opera in Vienna where her first role was Barbarina in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

In the golden age of orchestral recording – the 1950s cusp between mono and stereo – American labels piled into London and Vienna after an aggressive union priced their own musicians out of work. At Abbey Road, players worked 30 days on the trot, three sessions a day, to feed a burgeoning market for classical music. In Vienna, the Philharmonic (exclusively contracted to Decca) performed under six different names for other labels.

Mozart wrote some of his most appealing music for the mezzo-soprano voice with the roles of Cherubino and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Dorabella in Così fan tutte and Zerlina in DonGiovanni each boasting at least one memorable aria. Alongside these this disc includes a handful of concert arias including Ch'io mi scordi di te? which was written for the farewell performance of the great mezzo Nancy Storace with Mozart playing the concertante piano role. Here with as innate an interpreter of Mozart's piano writing as András Schiff and a voice so remarkably self-assured as Cecilia Bartoli's the electricity of that first, historic performance seems almost to be recreated.