Mozart's Marriage of Figaro is a comedy whose dark undertones explore the blurred boundaries between dying feudalism and emerging Enlightenment. Herman Prey's Figaro is admirably sung in a firm baritone and aptly characterized. So too, is his antagonist, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Count perpetually frustrated by the scheming wiles of Figaro and Susanna, here the perky Mirella Freni, who sings and acts like a dream. The Countess is creamy-voiced Kiri Te Kanawa, and the Cherubino, Maria Ewing, looks just like the horny, teenaged page she's supposed to be. The all-star leads are complemented by worthy supporting singers, the Vienna Philharmonic at the top of its form, and the experienced Mozartian, Karl Böhm conducting a stylishly fleet performance.
This performance, taped for TV in 1967, has many of the most famous singers in the German orbit of the time, mostly in prime form, in roles that suit them, a great conductor in his prime, and is a well thought out production. Don Carlos is given in German, in the four act version with the usual cuts of that era and some extra cuts (the royal procession in the first scene is gone, the middle of the garden scene is gone, cuts are made in all the ensembles in the auto da fe scene, there is a snip -- not the biggest I've heard -- in the final Carlos/Elisabetta duet -- and finally the very end is rewritten by unknown hands -- the Grand Inquisitor grasps Carlos, Elisabetta faints (so no Friar, identification of the Friar as Charles V, and no final B flat.)
Watching the Vienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, and a stellar cast record Wagner's immense Götterdämmerung for Decca in the fall of 1964 provides a thousand lessons in the art of working under pressure. For this classic documentary, The Golden Ring, a BBC camera crew eavesdropped as producer John Culshaw guided his engineering team through tricky technical maneuvers far removed from the relative ease of modern digital editing. What utter concentration and focus Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Gottlob Frick, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau bring to their collective and individual singing! Solti, for his part, oozes energy and exactitude as he pleads for greater precision and frets over details in the car en route to the sessions.
