Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro

In early May of 2008 I started exploring Mozart's Le Nozze again. My main goal this time was to explore how different ensembles of casts, orchestras and conductor read it. Here are the reviews from BBC music magazine, and then my own views:


Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Cecilia Bartoli, Sylvia McNair, Andrea Rost, Cheryl Studer, Boje Skovhus Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna PO/Claudio Abbado
Label: DG
Cat No: 445 903-2 DDD
Run Time: 169:48 (3 discs)
Performance: *****
Sound: *****

The choice here would seem to be clear-cut: between a big-budget, starrily cast, ‘traditional’ reading, under the direction of a conductor more attuned to late 19th- and 20th-century expressionismo, and a more modest, home-grown affair in the capable hands of one of our leading Mozartians. Life, however, is never that simple. For one thing, Abbado and the VPO are clearly au fait with the insights of the period-instrument movement. Every bit as deft and transparent as Mackerras and the SCO, the richer sound and polish of the Viennese players is just too hard to resist. For all Mackerras’s skills in tapping the Mozartian essence, the SCO can’t help but sound anaemic in comparison. Abbado, at one with his singers, also displays a more acute sense of theatre; Mackerras’s often undercharacterise. The exceptions are his Figaro (Alastair Miles) and Bartolo (Alfonso Antoniozzi). Otherwise Abbado wins hands down, with Sylvia McNair’s impish Susanna an absolute delight, Boje Skovhus every bit the virile young Count, and Cheryl Studer a touching, dignified Countess. The DG is the one to go for then (released mid-September), despite Mackerras’s added bonus of a substantial appendix of replacement numbers (not all by Mozart – and it shows!). Antony Bye


Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gundula Janowitz, Edith Mathis, Hermann Prey, Tatiana Troyanos; Deutsche Oper Berlin Chorus & Orchestra/Karl Böhm
Label: DG
Cat No: 449 728-2 ADD (Reissue)
Run Time: (3 discs)
Performance: *****
Sound: *****

Poised between the old certainties of the ‘great German tradition’ and the new freedoms/bonds of historically aware performance, Böhm’s 1968 Figaro still manages to steer its middle course rather well, spirited enough for those repelled by the weight of the Furtwängler/ Klemperer approach, but with enough expressive input and teleological drive to cater to those for whom today’s period performers seem impossibly lightweight and aimless. With no weak links amongst a stylish, largely German cast (among whom I would single out Janowitz’s radiant Countess, Prey’s laddish Figaro and Fischer-Dieskau’s dangerous-to-know Count), this is ensemble opera at its best and continues to justify its honoured place in the catalogue. Antony Bye


MozartMozartLe nozze di FigaroIldebrando d’Arcangelo, Anna Netrebko, Bo Skovhus, Dorothea Röschmann, Christine Schäfer; Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopenchor; Vienna PO/Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Label:
DG
Cat No:
477 6558
Run Time:
189:56 mins (3 discs)
Performance: **
Sound: *****
With these forces, how could anyone possibly make a hash of this Figaro? Not, it seems, by accident.This superb cast alone should outweigh most conceivable problems. You might perhaps find Counts and Countesses to match Skovhus and Roschmann, or a less black-voiced basso Figaro than D’Arcangelo; but surely none better. Even the hype-allergic could only applaud Netrebko’s Susanna, McLaughlin’s Marcellina, Schäfer’s Cherubino, and the rest of the ensemble. Ensemble it is, too, to an extent rare in such jetset festival stagings, with a genuine sense of interplay. Except that the interplay is consistently weird – either lifeless or agonized.These days, one automatically suspects the producer, but it’s eminently clear that Harnoncourt is driving the process. This is one of the slowest, most turgid Figaros since Klemperer’s famous disaster; but unlike Klemperer, witty beneath that granite exterior, Harnoncourt leaches every trace of Da Pontean wit and Mozartian sparkle out of the music, so systematically it has to be deliberate. Why? The man himself confidently assures us that Figaro is witty ‘only in the sense of intelligent’ and that playing it as fast-moving comedy ‘degrades Mozart to the level of a second-rate Rossini’. Whether composer or librettist would agree is seriously doubtful; but disregarding that – as fashion demands – does this approach actually work?Best answered, perhaps, by the DVD (see review, p84). But even if this intrigues you, I’d suggest you listen more widely – Gui, Giulini, Solti, Jacobs – before you risk good money. Michael Scott Rohan


I also listened to:
Le Nozze Di Figaro / Marriner / St. Martin-in-the-Fields / Van Dam, Hendricks, Raimondi, Popp, Baltsa, Lloyd, Palmer, Baldin

Hendricks is a great Susanna. Her reading fits the impish Susanna, her sonorous agile vibratos works great with thie operatic role. Van Dam is a a great lyric Baritone, Raimondi a nasty count.