Mozart - Die Zauberflöte - Popp, Gruberova, Jerusalem - Haitink, 19813CD - 71'28 & 54'52 & 32'05
EMI Classics 1993
Siegfried Jerusalem, Wolfgang Brendel, Edita Gruberová, Lucia Popp, Heinz Zednik, Peter Hofmann,...
Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks & Bernard Haitink
The cast is mostly excellent and at times stellar. I'll start with the firmament. Edita Gruberova is one of the (and possibly the) most exceptional Queen of the Night I have heard (and after some comparative listening, I'd be ready to claim that her two recitals of Mozart Concert Arias makes her possibly the best Mozart soprano ever: Mozart: Airs De Concert and Mozart: Concert Arias). She has both the ease in the stratospheric reaches, the required virtuosity in the runs and the vocal "body" to convey the character's range of emotions, and Haitink's conducting is appropriately fiery in her two arias.
Lucia Popp, who began as Klemperer's memorable Queen of the Night (Mozart: Die Zauberflote), here sings Pamina. She is great: in the arias the voice has both the angelic quality and the "body", her tight vibrato giving it the maturity and sensuousness of a real flesh and blood character; she is also wonderfully juvenile-sounding in the spoken dialogues.
Zednik is a perfect Monostatos: the timbre is nasal but it suits the character and conveys all its nastiness. Norman Bailey's Sprecher is solemn and deep-voiced, with traces of English accent. Roland Bracht is a good Sarastro, not as deep-grained as some but ample-voiced, noble and kind - actually a bit too uniformly kind in his Act II spoken dialogue to convey the frightening hatred of women that would make the character a little more ambiguous. But his Act I recitative does bring out those less than amiable features. ... -- Amazon customer
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