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cahnI may have gone a little overboard in listening/watching different versions. Note that these are very personal opinions… all you have to do is go on amazon to find people who strenuously disagree with me :)
Note that I do not know German, so cannot remark on that, and I mostly don't pay attention to the dialogue in recordings that contain it. I also have not generally talked about Papageno and not much about Pamina, for the simple reason that pretty much every recording I listened to had awesome singers for both.
First, I want to talk a little about the video recording I liked best, which is available on Youtube here with English subtitles. (I do not yet own this, but in the next Amazon run will buy it.)
BBC (2003): 4/5. Very solid singing and acting in this one. SIMON KEENLYSIDE, as usual, steals the show as Papageno. Dorothea Röschmann is a really great Pamina, very sweet, a very lovely singer, who is very believable in her whole arc; I really like her interpretation. Her acting during and after the Queen's big aria makes my heart break for her. I like Will Hartman very much; I think he believably acts his despair at having to repudiate Pamina, although his voice acting is not nearly as good as Röschmann's. Diana Damrau is a great Queen of the Night, her singing very natural and lovely while still nailing all the notes, although I sort of thought her costuming was a bit over-the-top (it reminded me of the Galadriel scene in the movie version of LOTR).
I liked the direction very much. And an interpretation I haven't seen in the other versions I watched: in the trial scenes where Tamino has to repudiate Pamina, it's awful for him. Really awful. To the extent that when the chorus comes in with a cheering aria after that, it's played more like a dirge, with him on his knees in despair. And when he then tells her to step back ("Zurück!"), it's a cry of despair, like his heart is being torn in two. Which, as far as I'm concerned, it should feel like for him. (In my fic/interpretation, I took this a little farther, where Tamino realizes he should not have repudiated her. I think this production definitely had this as a conscious subtext, though they didn't quite take the last step into making it more explicit.)
As far as I am concerned, this is the video Zauberflöte to get. Of the ones I've seen, I think this is my favorite so far. I don't own it yet, but I will in my next amazon order. The subtitles are not very accurate, as far as I can tell.
Now more than you ever wanted to know about the audio recordings. These are all available on Spotify (which is how I listened to them). This is in vague order of how much I liked them, from greatest to least.
Solti (Ziesak, Heilmann, Jo, Moll): I will freely confess that I have a weakness for this: this was my first Zauberflöte recording. So keep that in mind. I feel that it strikes a very good balance between the theatrical side of opera and the singing side of opera. (Of course, one woman's theater is another woman's melodrama, so there's that: I could imagine preferring, say, the Gardiner and its less theatrical (less melodramatic??) and more melodic take on it (see below).) I find myself both more moved and more amused by this recording than by pretty much any other recording I have heard. Both the singers and the orchestra are, I think, always conscious of the interaction between them, making it a partnership, which is marvelous to listen to. I feel like everyone has thought about what they want the interpretation to be, which sometimes is sublime (see the end of the "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" scene, which is the most beautiful I've ever heard it), and sometimes you might disagree, but at least they have thought about it.
The choice of the singers was clearly made from a standpoint of interpretation and working as part of an ensemble rather than from a sheer-beauty perspective; for instance, Uwe Heilmann has an extremely bright voice, perhaps a little too bright, and sadly, he sometimes strains hard for the high notes. But I can't really bring myself to care that much. I also find that the singers are more operatic and less oratorio, which I like a bit less (although I think it brings out the theater more), and which sometimes means the cutoffs are a bit not all together (sorry Three Ladies, you are the prime culprits here).
Recommended if you're coming to this from a musical/musical-theater background. I think this would also be a good first German Zauberflöte to get a sense for the story.
Not recommended if you are looking for the most pure and beautiful singing from a choral-oratorio standpoint, or dislike bright-toned singing (see the Abbado). (That being said, I would have put myself firmly in the choral-oratorio category, and yet I love this one so much. I think bright voices work well with Mozart, for one thing, and so does theater. But I may also be heavily biased.)
Gardiner (Oelze, Schade, Sieden, Peeters):
This one was so almost my Platonic (ha) recording. I love Gardiner for all choral/oratorio, and I trust his recordings to have castings that follow precisely the smooth, pure, not-overly-vibrato-ing tones that are exactly what I love in singers' voices. (This is why it took me such a long time to get into opera, and why I still have an abiding love for the early stuff and have never really dug into the 19th-century stuff.) He delivered those very nicely. The choral numbers are superlative. Michael Schade is my favorite Tamino of all of those I've listened to, both in gorgeousness of tone and in delicacy of interpretation. It is not at all surprising to me that he's done a lot of oratorio, much of it Bach. Harry Peeters is also one of the few Sarastros I have actually been able to listen to with a straight face -- I find most of them rather too wobbly and over-the-top -- although to be fair Peeters may be a little light-voiced for the arias (and why rush through them so quickly, Gardiner?) and is definitely irritatingly light-voiced for the Pamina-Tamino-Sarastro trio. Cyndia Sieden may be my favorite Queen, even though she occasionally gets very slightly off pitch on her arpeggios -- but her voice is gorgeous. Christiane Oelze is a lovely Pamina with a lovely voice, not quite Barbara Bonney (see the Ostman) but heck, close enough. I hadn't really been paying attention to the Three Boys at all until this recording -- they are So Good here that they made me very interested in their part -- he uses actual boys, and they are pure-voiced and spot-on and I love them a lot.
The ensemble numbers (duets, quintets, etc.) are generally completely gorgeous. "Tamino/Pamina mein! O welch ein Glück!" : AUGH. I defy you to listen to this part of this recording and tell me this opera isn't about forgiveness and redemption. I mean, none of the words are about that? But AUGH.
My big problem with this one is all the parts where I felt like Gardiner hadn't really thought through it and was just barreling through, especially compared to the Solti. Also, the interpretation of Papagena as whiny is really irritating to me (I think Papagena should be much more sassy, see the Mackerras recording). I also felt that, on close listening, there seems to be something odd about the balance. I felt sometimes like, particularly compared to the Solti or the Abbado, the singers were often just a trifle too soft for the orchestra, and occasionally I had a hard time hearing the lines coming out from the orchestra to combine with the singers, which is one of the gorgeous things about listening to Mozart. I assume it is because of the live recording (although the Abbado, also live, is better in this respect), but may be because of my suboptimal listening to it at work on Spotify (although I didn't find this with the other recordings).
Recommended for choral/oratorio fans and ensemble-number fans -- and Tamino fans! -- for a Zauberflote with beautiful singing. I think this might be my top choice for someone who's already quite familiar with the opera and is looking for a pure-voiced cast.
Not necessarily recommended for theater/musical people coming to this for the first time, or if the orchestra (or orchestra-choir interaction) is your focus.
Chandos/Mackerras (Banks, Tomlinson, Evans, Vidal): In their Sung in English series. This is a special recording for me, because, well, I don't speak German, so listening to this was an awesome experience. (This was also my first Sung in English opera, so was special for this reason as well.) It made me realize that opera (when it works for me) is really basically all the best things about musicals and all the best things about classical music rolled up into one. I love this recording so much. I really don't have any idea how good it is (though as I'll say later, I suspect it is quite good) because my experience of this is very different from my experience of the other Flutes; I respond to it viscerally and immersively, the way I respond to musicals, without the detachment I can bring to the other Flutes, where there's a language barrier between the meaning and what I can understand. This is the only one, obviously, where I can understand the dialogue, and it does make a huge difference. And the ensemble (trio, quintet, etc.) numbers are so much more awesome when I can understand the words.
But let me try to be a little more coherent and detached, here.
The translation (Jeremy Sams) is a free one; he has chosen to keep the rhyme at the expense of exact translation, and the dialogue is updated a bit to make a little more sense to a modern audience. (They take out the Moor stuff, and the really blatantly sexist stuff, but keep a lot of Sarastros' and Tamino's sexist lines, which... sometimes I wonder if it's intentional that Tomlinson's Sarastro is so pompous that he makes me laugh.) I think this was a good choice; I feel like the feeling of what it's like to listen to is probably pretty similar to how it felt to listen to the original. And some of the changes they make are pretty fun: Papageno, asked how he killed the serpent, stammers, "It's... all in the wrist..." which never fails to make me laugh. Sometimes I dislike the translation: at Pamina and Tamino's last meeting, Pamina says "Our love makes me immortal/ And safe while you are here" which... um... I take strong exception to. But a lot of times I had the opposite reaction: "Wait, that's not what's in the German... oh, okay, I guess that's actually pretty faithful to the intent of the German."
More generally, for someone who knows the German libretto well, though, it's going to be weird. I only know "Ach, ich fuhl's" well, and it it is very strange to have these related but different lyrics in a different language. (I have this experience with the Sung in English version of Marriage of Figaro, which I generally know far better in Italian than in English -- I do love it, a lot, but there are many parts where I have severe cognitive dissonance because the thing I want to sing is not what they are actually singing.) And the end duet between Pamina and Tamino I have listened to so many times in German that I have given up on even understanding the English words.
I'm not super-enamoured of the orchestra (also, could you have done "Ach ich fuhl's"/"Now I know that love can perish" any faster??), but, you know, SIMON KEENLYSIDE (and it's super-clear here, since I understand the libretto, how Papageno always steals the show from the other characters with the more earthy, humorous side of his character), and I very much like Rebecca Evans' Pamina (slightly on the darker-voiced side) -- she and Barry Banks' Tamino seem to strike a balance between the pure voicing of the Gardiner and the operatic voicing of the Solti (for instance).
I do find Banks' interpretation of Tamino's part uncomfortably pompous in the second act, however, where I felt both Heilmann on the Solti and Schade on the Gardiner play down the pompous casual sexism in the words and play up the gentleness in the music. This is by far my biggest problem with this recording, and tends to spoil the last quarter of it a bit for me. The Queen of the Night is fine, but why are her arias so slow? and you already know what I think of Sarastro. I adore this saucy Papagena.
Recommended if you are a fan of musicals and theater, an English speaker and not a German speaker, and wanting to get into opera. Not recommended if you're a German/libretto purist. Recommended with reservations if you're an English speaker but know the German version somewhat, and possibly not recommended if you know it well.
Ostman (Streit, Bonney, Jo, ):
This is the one to get for Barbara Bonney, who may be my favorite Pamina, like, ever, and she has a history of singing oratorio/chamber (she did a really gorgeous Pergolesi Stabat Mater) so is kind of amazing. Every so often she melts so beautifully into the orchestral accompaniment that it just breaks my heart. I may prefer others' interpretations (her "Ach ich fuhl's is quite different in phrasing than I'm used to), but I can't actually tell because her voice sort of takes over my brain. Otherwise, this is fairly close to the Gardiner in feel and in style (that is, closer to a pure-voiced early-music and oratorio style, farther away from romanticism and rich-opera style), with less of the irritating balance/orchestral problems of the Gardiner. It's maybe not got the perfection of the Gardiner ensembles, and Kurt Streit as Tamino isn't quite Schade. I personally like the Gardiner better (something in this one just doesn't quite engage my brain to the same degree), but I could see why someone (who does not possess my particular brain) would prefer the Ostman.
Recommended for Pamina fans!
Not necessarily recommended for theater/musical people coming to this for the first time.
Abbado (Miklosa, Röschmann, Strehl, Papé ):
I feel like this is close to the Solti in style (more operatic, more theatrical, less pure-toned, a lot of attention given to the interaction between the singers and the orchestra, very thoughtful direction in general), but the big difference is that the singers are generally much darker in tone than either the bright-voiced Solti singers or the Gardiner/Ostman pure-voiced singers. If you like that, you'll probably like this production; if not, you won't. I had a hard time getting used to this because of being imprinted by the Solti, so this is one of the ones I like a little less. I was very dubious about it for the first half an act or so, but he'd mostly won me over by the second act. Dorothea Röschmann helped; she is a luminously intelligent Pamina (and then I had to go listen to her Pergolesi Stabat Mater again, one of my favorite recordings ever, AUGH, it never stops punching me in the heart). I never fully got used to Strehl as Tamino, however. However, I could imagine being the other way around: being imprinted by this and not liking the Solti as much as a result. The ensembles are a little less spot on than Solti, which I also dislike. But! Rene Papé as Sarastro is easily my favorite Sarastro. He actually brings a little bit of subtlety to the role, whereas I get the bad feeling that some of them are just pounding out those arias and showing off their low notes.
Recommended for people who like dark-toned singers, or theater/music/opera people. Recommended for orchestral people. Recommended if you want to know what my idea of a Sarastro sounds like :)
Not recommended if you are looking for the most pure and beautiful singing from a choral-oratorio standpoint, or if you like bright-voiced singers.
Bohm (Lear, Peters, Wunderlich, Fischer-Dieskau): I haven't finished listening to this one yet, so I don't have much to say about it, except -- this one is slow, but I still like it a lot! I kept hearing about how awesome Fritz Wunderlich was, and I have to admit I like him quite a lot.
Klemperer: Compared to the other recordings I've listened to, this one is soooooooo sloooooooow that it's really hard for me to get past that (except the Bohm, and that one has such great singers that it makes up for the slowness). It's true that the slowness makes it easier to bring out some of the beauty of certain passages. But it also makes others far more boring to me! No, sorry, I can't get over it :) It's perfectly pleasant, but I just don't have much to say about it...
Recommended for people who think the other recordings are too fast.
Not recommended if you have just been listening to a bunch of the other faster recordings :)
Note that I do not know German, so cannot remark on that, and I mostly don't pay attention to the dialogue in recordings that contain it. I also have not generally talked about Papageno and not much about Pamina, for the simple reason that pretty much every recording I listened to had awesome singers for both.
First, I want to talk a little about the video recording I liked best, which is available on Youtube here with English subtitles. (I do not yet own this, but in the next Amazon run will buy it.)
BBC (2003): 4/5. Very solid singing and acting in this one. SIMON KEENLYSIDE, as usual, steals the show as Papageno. Dorothea Röschmann is a really great Pamina, very sweet, a very lovely singer, who is very believable in her whole arc; I really like her interpretation. Her acting during and after the Queen's big aria makes my heart break for her. I like Will Hartman very much; I think he believably acts his despair at having to repudiate Pamina, although his voice acting is not nearly as good as Röschmann's. Diana Damrau is a great Queen of the Night, her singing very natural and lovely while still nailing all the notes, although I sort of thought her costuming was a bit over-the-top (it reminded me of the Galadriel scene in the movie version of LOTR).
I liked the direction very much. And an interpretation I haven't seen in the other versions I watched: in the trial scenes where Tamino has to repudiate Pamina, it's awful for him. Really awful. To the extent that when the chorus comes in with a cheering aria after that, it's played more like a dirge, with him on his knees in despair. And when he then tells her to step back ("Zurück!"), it's a cry of despair, like his heart is being torn in two. Which, as far as I'm concerned, it should feel like for him. (In my fic/interpretation, I took this a little farther, where Tamino realizes he should not have repudiated her. I think this production definitely had this as a conscious subtext, though they didn't quite take the last step into making it more explicit.)
As far as I am concerned, this is the video Zauberflöte to get. Of the ones I've seen, I think this is my favorite so far. I don't own it yet, but I will in my next amazon order. The subtitles are not very accurate, as far as I can tell.
Now more than you ever wanted to know about the audio recordings. These are all available on Spotify (which is how I listened to them). This is in vague order of how much I liked them, from greatest to least.
Solti (Ziesak, Heilmann, Jo, Moll): I will freely confess that I have a weakness for this: this was my first Zauberflöte recording. So keep that in mind. I feel that it strikes a very good balance between the theatrical side of opera and the singing side of opera. (Of course, one woman's theater is another woman's melodrama, so there's that: I could imagine preferring, say, the Gardiner and its less theatrical (less melodramatic??) and more melodic take on it (see below).) I find myself both more moved and more amused by this recording than by pretty much any other recording I have heard. Both the singers and the orchestra are, I think, always conscious of the interaction between them, making it a partnership, which is marvelous to listen to. I feel like everyone has thought about what they want the interpretation to be, which sometimes is sublime (see the end of the "Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!" scene, which is the most beautiful I've ever heard it), and sometimes you might disagree, but at least they have thought about it.
The choice of the singers was clearly made from a standpoint of interpretation and working as part of an ensemble rather than from a sheer-beauty perspective; for instance, Uwe Heilmann has an extremely bright voice, perhaps a little too bright, and sadly, he sometimes strains hard for the high notes. But I can't really bring myself to care that much. I also find that the singers are more operatic and less oratorio, which I like a bit less (although I think it brings out the theater more), and which sometimes means the cutoffs are a bit not all together (sorry Three Ladies, you are the prime culprits here).
Recommended if you're coming to this from a musical/musical-theater background. I think this would also be a good first German Zauberflöte to get a sense for the story.
Not recommended if you are looking for the most pure and beautiful singing from a choral-oratorio standpoint, or dislike bright-toned singing (see the Abbado). (That being said, I would have put myself firmly in the choral-oratorio category, and yet I love this one so much. I think bright voices work well with Mozart, for one thing, and so does theater. But I may also be heavily biased.)
Gardiner (Oelze, Schade, Sieden, Peeters):
This one was so almost my Platonic (ha) recording. I love Gardiner for all choral/oratorio, and I trust his recordings to have castings that follow precisely the smooth, pure, not-overly-vibrato-ing tones that are exactly what I love in singers' voices. (This is why it took me such a long time to get into opera, and why I still have an abiding love for the early stuff and have never really dug into the 19th-century stuff.) He delivered those very nicely. The choral numbers are superlative. Michael Schade is my favorite Tamino of all of those I've listened to, both in gorgeousness of tone and in delicacy of interpretation. It is not at all surprising to me that he's done a lot of oratorio, much of it Bach. Harry Peeters is also one of the few Sarastros I have actually been able to listen to with a straight face -- I find most of them rather too wobbly and over-the-top -- although to be fair Peeters may be a little light-voiced for the arias (and why rush through them so quickly, Gardiner?) and is definitely irritatingly light-voiced for the Pamina-Tamino-Sarastro trio. Cyndia Sieden may be my favorite Queen, even though she occasionally gets very slightly off pitch on her arpeggios -- but her voice is gorgeous. Christiane Oelze is a lovely Pamina with a lovely voice, not quite Barbara Bonney (see the Ostman) but heck, close enough. I hadn't really been paying attention to the Three Boys at all until this recording -- they are So Good here that they made me very interested in their part -- he uses actual boys, and they are pure-voiced and spot-on and I love them a lot.
The ensemble numbers (duets, quintets, etc.) are generally completely gorgeous. "Tamino/Pamina mein! O welch ein Glück!" : AUGH. I defy you to listen to this part of this recording and tell me this opera isn't about forgiveness and redemption. I mean, none of the words are about that? But AUGH.
My big problem with this one is all the parts where I felt like Gardiner hadn't really thought through it and was just barreling through, especially compared to the Solti. Also, the interpretation of Papagena as whiny is really irritating to me (I think Papagena should be much more sassy, see the Mackerras recording). I also felt that, on close listening, there seems to be something odd about the balance. I felt sometimes like, particularly compared to the Solti or the Abbado, the singers were often just a trifle too soft for the orchestra, and occasionally I had a hard time hearing the lines coming out from the orchestra to combine with the singers, which is one of the gorgeous things about listening to Mozart. I assume it is because of the live recording (although the Abbado, also live, is better in this respect), but may be because of my suboptimal listening to it at work on Spotify (although I didn't find this with the other recordings).
Recommended for choral/oratorio fans and ensemble-number fans -- and Tamino fans! -- for a Zauberflote with beautiful singing. I think this might be my top choice for someone who's already quite familiar with the opera and is looking for a pure-voiced cast.
Not necessarily recommended for theater/musical people coming to this for the first time, or if the orchestra (or orchestra-choir interaction) is your focus.
Chandos/Mackerras (Banks, Tomlinson, Evans, Vidal): In their Sung in English series. This is a special recording for me, because, well, I don't speak German, so listening to this was an awesome experience. (This was also my first Sung in English opera, so was special for this reason as well.) It made me realize that opera (when it works for me) is really basically all the best things about musicals and all the best things about classical music rolled up into one. I love this recording so much. I really don't have any idea how good it is (though as I'll say later, I suspect it is quite good) because my experience of this is very different from my experience of the other Flutes; I respond to it viscerally and immersively, the way I respond to musicals, without the detachment I can bring to the other Flutes, where there's a language barrier between the meaning and what I can understand. This is the only one, obviously, where I can understand the dialogue, and it does make a huge difference. And the ensemble (trio, quintet, etc.) numbers are so much more awesome when I can understand the words.
But let me try to be a little more coherent and detached, here.
The translation (Jeremy Sams) is a free one; he has chosen to keep the rhyme at the expense of exact translation, and the dialogue is updated a bit to make a little more sense to a modern audience. (They take out the Moor stuff, and the really blatantly sexist stuff, but keep a lot of Sarastros' and Tamino's sexist lines, which... sometimes I wonder if it's intentional that Tomlinson's Sarastro is so pompous that he makes me laugh.) I think this was a good choice; I feel like the feeling of what it's like to listen to is probably pretty similar to how it felt to listen to the original. And some of the changes they make are pretty fun: Papageno, asked how he killed the serpent, stammers, "It's... all in the wrist..." which never fails to make me laugh. Sometimes I dislike the translation: at Pamina and Tamino's last meeting, Pamina says "Our love makes me immortal/ And safe while you are here" which... um... I take strong exception to. But a lot of times I had the opposite reaction: "Wait, that's not what's in the German... oh, okay, I guess that's actually pretty faithful to the intent of the German."
More generally, for someone who knows the German libretto well, though, it's going to be weird. I only know "Ach, ich fuhl's" well, and it it is very strange to have these related but different lyrics in a different language. (I have this experience with the Sung in English version of Marriage of Figaro, which I generally know far better in Italian than in English -- I do love it, a lot, but there are many parts where I have severe cognitive dissonance because the thing I want to sing is not what they are actually singing.) And the end duet between Pamina and Tamino I have listened to so many times in German that I have given up on even understanding the English words.
I'm not super-enamoured of the orchestra (also, could you have done "Ach ich fuhl's"/"Now I know that love can perish" any faster??), but, you know, SIMON KEENLYSIDE (and it's super-clear here, since I understand the libretto, how Papageno always steals the show from the other characters with the more earthy, humorous side of his character), and I very much like Rebecca Evans' Pamina (slightly on the darker-voiced side) -- she and Barry Banks' Tamino seem to strike a balance between the pure voicing of the Gardiner and the operatic voicing of the Solti (for instance).
I do find Banks' interpretation of Tamino's part uncomfortably pompous in the second act, however, where I felt both Heilmann on the Solti and Schade on the Gardiner play down the pompous casual sexism in the words and play up the gentleness in the music. This is by far my biggest problem with this recording, and tends to spoil the last quarter of it a bit for me. The Queen of the Night is fine, but why are her arias so slow? and you already know what I think of Sarastro. I adore this saucy Papagena.
Recommended if you are a fan of musicals and theater, an English speaker and not a German speaker, and wanting to get into opera. Not recommended if you're a German/libretto purist. Recommended with reservations if you're an English speaker but know the German version somewhat, and possibly not recommended if you know it well.
Ostman (Streit, Bonney, Jo, ):
This is the one to get for Barbara Bonney, who may be my favorite Pamina, like, ever, and she has a history of singing oratorio/chamber (she did a really gorgeous Pergolesi Stabat Mater) so is kind of amazing. Every so often she melts so beautifully into the orchestral accompaniment that it just breaks my heart. I may prefer others' interpretations (her "Ach ich fuhl's is quite different in phrasing than I'm used to), but I can't actually tell because her voice sort of takes over my brain. Otherwise, this is fairly close to the Gardiner in feel and in style (that is, closer to a pure-voiced early-music and oratorio style, farther away from romanticism and rich-opera style), with less of the irritating balance/orchestral problems of the Gardiner. It's maybe not got the perfection of the Gardiner ensembles, and Kurt Streit as Tamino isn't quite Schade. I personally like the Gardiner better (something in this one just doesn't quite engage my brain to the same degree), but I could see why someone (who does not possess my particular brain) would prefer the Ostman.
Recommended for Pamina fans!
Not necessarily recommended for theater/musical people coming to this for the first time.
Abbado (Miklosa, Röschmann, Strehl, Papé ):
I feel like this is close to the Solti in style (more operatic, more theatrical, less pure-toned, a lot of attention given to the interaction between the singers and the orchestra, very thoughtful direction in general), but the big difference is that the singers are generally much darker in tone than either the bright-voiced Solti singers or the Gardiner/Ostman pure-voiced singers. If you like that, you'll probably like this production; if not, you won't. I had a hard time getting used to this because of being imprinted by the Solti, so this is one of the ones I like a little less. I was very dubious about it for the first half an act or so, but he'd mostly won me over by the second act. Dorothea Röschmann helped; she is a luminously intelligent Pamina (and then I had to go listen to her Pergolesi Stabat Mater again, one of my favorite recordings ever, AUGH, it never stops punching me in the heart). I never fully got used to Strehl as Tamino, however. However, I could imagine being the other way around: being imprinted by this and not liking the Solti as much as a result. The ensembles are a little less spot on than Solti, which I also dislike. But! Rene Papé as Sarastro is easily my favorite Sarastro. He actually brings a little bit of subtlety to the role, whereas I get the bad feeling that some of them are just pounding out those arias and showing off their low notes.
Recommended for people who like dark-toned singers, or theater/music/opera people. Recommended for orchestral people. Recommended if you want to know what my idea of a Sarastro sounds like :)
Not recommended if you are looking for the most pure and beautiful singing from a choral-oratorio standpoint, or if you like bright-voiced singers.
Bohm (Lear, Peters, Wunderlich, Fischer-Dieskau): I haven't finished listening to this one yet, so I don't have much to say about it, except -- this one is slow, but I still like it a lot! I kept hearing about how awesome Fritz Wunderlich was, and I have to admit I like him quite a lot.
Klemperer: Compared to the other recordings I've listened to, this one is soooooooo sloooooooow that it's really hard for me to get past that (except the Bohm, and that one has such great singers that it makes up for the slowness). It's true that the slowness makes it easier to bring out some of the beauty of certain passages. But it also makes others far more boring to me! No, sorry, I can't get over it :) It's perfectly pleasant, but I just don't have much to say about it...
Recommended for people who think the other recordings are too fast.
Not recommended if you have just been listening to a bunch of the other faster recordings :)
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Date: 2014-01-04 05:21 pm (UTC)*grin* Yeah, I can see thinking of Abbado this way (I was not previously very aware of his work, and in general know very little about non-choral conductors) -- I definitely had the impression that that recording was very like the Solti orchestrally. I wonder if it was cast so differently from the Solti on purpose?
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Date: 2014-01-21 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-21 06:49 pm (UTC)