Word: mozart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music makes the evenings a worthwhile proposition. In spite of dreadful limitations, Teresa Marrin, the music director, has managed to come up with a compelling reading of Mozart's score. Her tempi are brisk throughout (occasionally creating problems for some of the singers), and betray a wager on the comic rather than the mystical. The playing is controlled, and some roughness in the brass is more than forgivable given the splendid delivery of the all-important flute part...
Unfortunately, the rest of the production does not meet the uniformly high standard of the accompaniment. The major roles are well sung, but, apart from Paul Lincoln's effectively goofy Papageno, the characters do not reveal the depth of psychological development implicit in Mozart's music. Oliver Worthington brings to the role of Tamino a lovely voice but little more, and Ling Ning Xu's Sarastro is dignified but unprepossessing. Worst of all, the Queen of the Night (Maria Tegzes), who has a voice that stands up to the test of her role's legendary difficulties, completely fails to command...
This production, as it aims to provide a new interpretation, unwittingly raises our initial question: can we, chic, savvy post-moderns that we are, that still take Mozart seriously? And the answer that stares this disappointed reviewer in the face: not if we waffle about the expansiveness of his music without stopping to think what it is about. The message that is built into the Magic Flute concerns love, human and divine, fraternal and romantic. The element of farce that is undeniably present in the opera does not obliterate or even minimally detract from the power of this message...
...example is John Eliot Gardiner's recording of La Clemenza di Tito (to be released April 21 on Deutsche Grammophon Archiv). Here, a truly innovative approach (using period instruments) combines with a genuine reappraisal of the opera as a whole, and the result is nothing less than a revelation. Mozart worked on both Tito and the Magic Flute at the same time during the summer of 1791 and at great speed. Yet, while the music of the Magic Flute has met with universal praise almost since its premiere, that of Tito has been disparaged as the product of a sick...
...Tito is Mozart's second and last opera seria, and shows a master grappling with a heavily codified form and using it to his compositional advantage. Although the form had traditionally excluded ensemble singing, Mozart's greatest successes had been with the extensive ensembles in his great comic operas. Accordingly, he came up with a compromise that went beyond even his ensemble writing for these operas: the finale to the first act, which combines an on-stage ensemble and an antiphonal chorus...