Mozart: Die Zauberflöte

Mozart’s final pair of operas have done rather well out of this year’s celebrations. La Clemenza di Tito has had two recommendable new recordings (from Sir Charles Mackerras and René Jacobs) and this month sees the release of Claudio Abbado’s first recording of Die Zauberflöte, taped live during a run of performances in the Teatro Comunale in Modena in September 2005.

Abbado’s view of Mozartian style has changed out of all recognition since his collaborations with Rudolf Serkin in the early 1980s. These days, he’s a fully paid-up member of the “historically aware” movement, and this Flute can be compared with the best of the period instrument versions, those conducted by Arnold Östman and William Christie, as well as Sir Charles Mackerras’s English-language version with the LPO. Speeds are fleet, but never merely brisk, as they tend to be on John Eliot Gardiner’s rather stern account on Archiv. As in all of the most successful performances of this mysterious, dream-like piece, the music somehow makes the varied happenings on stage seem completely logical. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Abbado’s regular partner-in-crime these days, plays fabulously for him.

Abbado’s cast is young, and not particularly starry. The Tamino, Christoph Strehl, hasn’t been seen much in Britain yet, but his career is rapidly going into orbit. And so it should, for he has a beautifully even voice and an appealingly fresh response to the text. Dorothea Röschmann is one of the loveliest Paminas on record, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann, a recitalist in Edinburgh in 2005, brings genuine charm to Papageno’s music. The “star” singer here is the Sarastro; René Pape lives up to his high reputation with singing of grave beauty and unforced authority. I can’t say that I’m mad for Erika Miklósa’s Queen of the Night; Der Hölle Rache is not ideally steady, and she doesn’t display the range of colour that the very best Queens find in her stratospheric arias (check out Lucia Popp’s astonishing singing on Klemperer’s EMI recording). The smaller parts are all well taken, not something you can say about many Flutes on record.

Unlike Klemperer, who refused to include any of the spoken dialogue in his recording, Abbado uses a pretty full text, and it’s sparkily delivered by the cast. Haters of live recordings won’t find much to grumble about here. There’s some enthusiastic applause at the end and a bit of appreciative chuckling from time to time, but otherwise the Italian audience is commendably quiet.