The very fine recording production(转发)

4 1/2 stars -- The half-star reduction reflects my sense that towards the end, the sound engineers don't do what's needed to give the chorus a bit more weight, and there's also some sketchy sounds from at least one of the three boys. But on the whole, this is a very engaging set, and I see the singing, as Santa Fe Listener does, as being on the whole very good (sorry, Ralph Moore: we disagree on this one!). Strehl, Roschmann, Pape, Muller-Brachmann, and Miklosa are all splendid, I think, and given that we have here recordings from a live production, the quality of performance is excellent overall. No -- these guys aren't Wunderlich, Popp, or the young Fischer-Dieskau, but they weren't given golden voices. They were given good voices, and they're fine musicians, and the whole thing is very lively. Miklosa is easily the scariest Queen of the Night on record; Strehl's pleasantly reedy tenor has the requisite power and expressive capacities when needed; Pape's airy, focussed and warm bass has all the notes, and is as good as any I've heard. Roschmann sounds like a woman, not a girl, and sings with great sensitivity. The spoken dialogue is handled by the singers (not by actors, as in the bad old DG days), and they are fully involved in the drama, whether speaking or singing. And finally, like William Christie on Erato, but with modern instruments, Abbado puts a spring in the step of the whole thing. If I prefer Abbado to Christie, it's because his singers are a bit better, I think, but the strength of both is that they don't over-solemnize the music. Some reviewers and commenters deplore the lack of "depth" in Abbado's approach, but I think Abbado understands that this is one of the weakest of Mozart's great operas and that it does better to keep it moving.

Indulge me for a minute and let me support that claim about relative weakness -- and I don't deny that the opera contains some wonderful music. But the whole drama is too crudely schematic, it lacks psychological and emotive interest, it's dramaturgically incoherent, and it's musically uneven. Add to that a whiff of racism (Monostatos) and a plot that depends on a sexist assumption -- none of these things could be said of the Da Ponte operas, where folly is human and not specifically gendered and where psychological and moral interest is high -- and where the music is more consistently effective throughout. I attribute most of what I perceive as problems to the Masonic template with which Mozart and Schikaneder were working. Musically, the biggest disappointment is the Act Two finale -- it's brief, perfunctory, and not sublime, where sublimity is surely called for. The Act One finale, by contrast, is the real thing. The Act Two finale is where the weakness in the dramaturgy shows up too -- when the Queen, Monostatos, and the Ladies enter right before the end and are VERY quickly dispatched, I wonder: weren't these Ladies send tumbling, literally, to hell earlier in the Act? Now they're back??? The music of the final trial for Tamino and Pamina is weak too -- there's no sense of danger in the music, and I've never seen a staging in which the ordeal looks like or lasts long enough to be an ordeal. Thank God for Papageno and Papagena late in Act Two -- it may be buffo stuff, but it's lively, charming, and engaging. In fact, Act Two as a whole is very spotty -- Sarastro's great moments, and Papageno's trials are the high spots. Tamino and Pamina are much better served in Act One. So . . . to get back to the point: Abbado does well to keep things moving, and the sublime moments in Act One aren't undercut. The orchestral detail is realized with marvelous transparency and with no loss of impetus, and it's as if you're hearing the opera with fresh ears in its best moments. I like Haitink's recording -- with a great cast -- very much, but put it head-to-head with this one, and it sounds a bit tame. The best of the older recordings is Fricsay's. It has a real energy, and so does this one.