Living Up to Mozart
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music LIVING UP TO MOZART BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (The Abduclion from the Seruglio) has had a brief history at the Metropolitan Opera. It first arrived...
...Nothing, however, quite matches the "Confulatis maledictis," with its startling shifts of mood: from the exclamatory opening to the disembodied strains the soprano chorus floating above solo violins to the somber rolling of the concluding passage where the strings rise from the orchestra and above the chorus like dolphins arching into view...
...And John Dexter's direction, departing here from the libretto, brilliantly awakens it to dramatic life...
...She gives an aristocratic performance...
...But Levine's fresh interpretive intelligence at the center was never in doubt, either in the broadcast or in New York...
...The performance is outstanding for its lyricism and its drama as well...
...Her pitch is true...
...In the quartets they are well matched, and their account of the extended "Recordare" is eloquent indeed...
...Among the principals, only Eric Tap-py, an uncommonly adult and manly Tamino, and Jose van Dam, eloquent in the solemn part of the Speaker, met festival standards...
...In the exquisite part of Blondchen (Konstanze's maid, Pedrillo's sweetheart and the frustration of Osmin), the Irish soprano Norma Burrowes made an enchanting Met debut...
...Against this decor, the players stand out in high definition: Belmonte, the Spanish nobleman, whose search for his beloved, the shipwrecked Konstanze, has brought him to the place where she is held in the power of Pasha Selim, a Turkish potentate...
...Christian Bosch's Papageno seemed, musically speaking, to have wandered in off the street...
...in more expansive moments, he summons up a gravity that few conductors can achieve without the kind of ponderousness that is so often (wrongly) thought to be "philosophical...
...When she sings, the story is different...
...her phrases, artful...
...Vet, surprisingly, scale was not one of the problems in this generally triumphant production...
...Lloyd's bass is commendable for its sharp focus, a quality it shares with Tear's tenor, which is capable of suppler inflections...
...In the "Tuba minim" section, which evokes the last trumpet and the raising of the dead, Giulini allows the trombone to develop to the full the strange seductiveness of its amazing solo...
...After four performances, it was dropped and did not return until this year, when it led off the season's new productions...
...With liveried retinue parading in file, and the turbaned Janissaries rising like genies from the calyxes of their pantaloons, the encounter between the Pasha in his sleek pastels and Konstanze, clad in decorous black, makes a resplendent stage picture...
...Dexter's direction, though, is consistently imaginative...
...Left unfinished and only partly scored at the composer's death, the Requiem is a fragment—though a fragment like the Victory of Samothrace or the Elgin marbles whose magnificence shines forth undiminished by the "accident" of incompleteness...
...Kurt Moll's Osmin is a rich comic creation, delightfully sung in some of the most taxing music ever written for bass...
...Nonetheless, the real star among the singers is the Philharmonia Chorus, whose vivid, precise and impassioned contribution so thrillingly realizes Mozart's vision—and Giulini's conception of it...
...IleanaCotrubas overlaid Pa-mina's virtue with cloying soulfulness...
...As Konstanze, the elegant Edda Moser moves through the ritual with intense dramatic presence...
...In the "Dies irae," Giulini achieves a Verdian intensity—and without resorting to sheer volume to ignite the hell fires...
...As in the original, the Pasha has sought by magnanimity and patient devotion to win Konstanze's heart, but has reaped only her respect...
...Her speaking voice was equally unalluring...
...she is steely, harsh and loveless...
...Not that it has been a lean year for Mozart vocal music on disc...
...The effect is intimate, and at the same time free and open...
...The few flashes of musical excitement do not compensate for her prevailing devastation...
...Levine's recent albums have been devoted to projects such as the Mahler symphonies and a seemingly endless series of Italian operas starring Renata Scotto...
...Helen Donath, Christa Ludwig, Robert Tear, and Robert Lloyd are the soloists...
...Giulini conveys that magnificence by the complementary means of structural rigor and surrender to the score's melodic splendors...
...Conductor James Levine reconfirms that he is a Mozartian of consequence...
...In allegro, his brisk tempos strike a note of festive ardor...
...the third act, within the courtyard, though handsome, cannot compare with the wondrousness of the first...
...and the open-stage transformation to the harbor at the end is merely pretty...
...The contrapuntal passages are laid out with almost academic strictness, yet the emotional effect is never abstract or remote...
...Ludwig, the alto, has over the years of a long career developed a darker, more lustrous sound than was hers before...
...At the Metropolitan, the Pasha's litter is borne on from the wings, and a more severe Konstanze steps forward to meet him from the decorative fortress where she is held captive...
...The Salzburg Flute, like the Met Abduction, had its share of casting problems: Martti Talvela growled and gargled his way through the part of Sarastro...
...It is time for the recording studios to start paying attention to his Mozart...
...and Edita Gruberova made an unpleasant Queen of the Night...
...He followed up this summer with a triumphant Zauberflbte (brought to American listeners over the stations of National Public Radio...
...her tone, sweet...
...I never saw the inside of the old Met, but over the past decade 1 have come to know the "new" house at Lincoln Center well...
...According to the libretto, they enter together from an outing on his pleasure boat during which she has once more gently rebuffed him...
...For the extended orchestral introduction to Konstanze's stupendous aria, "Martern alter Arten" ("All manner of torture"), he has worked out a pantomime that has the heroine defying the Pasha's henchmen and being imprisoned within a circle of swords...
...The second act, in the seraglio gardens, is disfigured by a garish scarlet ribbon of fence...
...To bring the action close to the audience, Joycelyn Herbert has used the simple device of building the playing surface out beyond the proscenium, saving the depth of the stage for spacious evocations of the opera's Moorish locale...
...and she knows the art of simplicity...
...it is her finest moment...
...In her set for the first act, liquescently blue onion domes recede into the red distance...
...Idomeneo, with its epic sweep and rich use of the chorus, is slated for 1982-83, and should sound majestic there...
...Nicolai Gedda, who was once a Belmonte of distinction—as his recorded performance on Seraphim SIB-6025 attests—still has the style to suggest the part's lyricism...
...In Salzburg, on the other hand, his reading two seasons ago of La Clemenza di Tito won him culture-hero status...
...and her love of Mozart's music and her verses was manifest in every note that she sang...
...It first arrived at the theater on 39th Street and Broadway, now nostalgically remembered as the "old house," in 1946...
...Norbert Orth is a pleasing Pedrillo, more at ease with the simple, direct vocal statements of his first aria than with the seductive lines of his third-act romanze, but pleasing there, too...
...The succeeding tableaux do not match the intensity of this one...
...and finally the Pasha and Konstanze themselves...
...Her soprano is a light instrument, beautifully schooled...
...the vision is anchored by plumes of dark cedars and the lush spray of an arching fig that spills over the wall...
...On her own, Donath generally lacks the expressive radiance the work and the performance deserve, except in the last phrases of her part (the "Luxaeterna" in the Comunio), sung with melting tenderness...
...The firmly sculpted bass line that accompanies the chorus at the words "et lux perpetua" early in the Introitus, for instance, defines the harmonic state of affairs at the same time as it helps articulate the shape of the descending choral phrase...
...Giulini's reading of the section is hypnotic: The touch of extra breadth (crescendo plus ritard) he lends the final, unrepeated Amen brings the piece to a conclusion that is at once subtle, fulfilled and monumental...
...The other assignments are in more suitable hands...
...It is a magnificent cavern...
...Two rival versions of Don Giovanni, for example, are just out—Lorin Maazel's on Columbia Masterworks M3 35192 (with the cast of the Joseph Losey film) and Sir Georg Solti's on London OSA-1444...
...the foolish but crafty Osmin, who oversees the Pasha's properties...
...While Moser is the central trouble with this Entfuhrung, she is not the only one...
...unfortunately, he has lost the pleasing timbre and breath control to realize it...
...they meet like kings in parley...
...Her austerity transforms the bittersweet sentimental quality of their encounter...
...But perhaps the most interesting new release is the performance of Mozart's Requiem by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini (Angel SZ-37600...
...At the Met, his personal attention to Mozart has been no more than sporadic...
...His performances have displayed a wonderful regard for clarity, proportion and balance...
...In the Offertorium, at the words "quam olim Abrahae promisisti," the same vigor and lift are again in evidence...
...Die Entfuhrung, on the other hand, hardly seems a natural choice for the vast Metropolitan, especially considering that among its most celebrated productions is the one performed in Salzburg by puppets...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 24
