Customer Reviews

Mozart: Don Giovanni

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For as long as I can remember, this recording made at the then newly-built opera house on John Christie's country estate at Glyndebourne, Sussex, England, has been highly rated and universally admired. Critics and reviewers in recent times have generally rated it as indispensable, even though it was recorded more than seventy years ago. I believe it was the first complete recording of the opera. It was made over a period of one week while the opera festival was in progress. Now comes this excellent Ward Marston restoration on the super budget Naxos label to a newer listening public in the C21st.

Keith Anderson, in the accompanying notes, provides an explanation for the greatness of the Mozart opera productions that opened the Glyndbourne opera house in the 1930s. They were strong ensemble productions. The conductor was Fritz Busch. The producer was Carl Ebert. Rudolf Bing became involved also in 1936.

As has frequently happened in subsequent productions, the cast of singers is drawn from many countries - almost as many as Leporello mentions in his catalogue aria. The don is an Australian, Leporello an Italian, Anna an American, Elvira an Austrian, Zerlina is English, Ottavio is Hungarian, and Masetto is Scottish. Outstanding amongst them is Salvatore Baccaloni as Leporello. He encompasses the vocal part with ease, he colours his voice with skill, and he delivers the recitatives at a spanking pace. John Brownlee is noticeably slower in the latter requirement. His singing always has the stamp of the aristocrat, suggesting a don destined for life-long partnership with a Spanish infanta rather than a don responsible for a catalogue of seductions. Ina Souez, powerful of voice and well in command of her difficult music, suggests a donna well able to defend herself from molestation, with or without the aid of Don Ottavio. Kolomon von Pataky sings eloquently throughout. Although the conductor favours fast tempi generally, Ottavio's two arias are taken slowly, preventing Pataky from attempting the "all in one breath" feats that many tenors achieve in these arias. Roy Henderson brings a few welcome touches of characterisation to the minor part of Masetto.

It is of course in the ensembles and the Act One finale that the opera's greatest sequences occur. Happily, these sections are wonderfully well-realised in this production. Indeed, the sense of ensemble and company interaction is perhaps the greatest strength of this classic recording.

As an appendix, Naxos provides excerpts from "Don Giovanni" performed by what they call "golden age singers" - including Chaliapin, Leider, Tauber, Pinza, and Elisabeth Schumann - in recordings made between 1926 and 1939.

I won't even lower myself to find exactly what the legal copyright fluff was with EMI that caused this extraordinary 70-year-old recording (that maybe 3000 people worldwide remotely care about) to be yanked from circulation. I picked mine up at a music retailer's--coincidentally at the moment he was gathering up various Naxos discs involved in this altercation, in preparation to returning them. Now the question is when will this be re-released and will we ever again hear the incredible remastering done by Ward Marston; it's all in the hands of lawyers and money people now. It's the best DG I've ever heard and, in a peculiar yet wonderful sense, the best sounding. The clarity of this recording of this singular cast is amazing! Some background hiss but who the heck cares.

Anyway, if this ever turns up again, or if you spot it in a cutout bin at some backwater shop grab it.

I agree with the previous reviewers.

This is a justly famous recording of what must have been a fabulous ensemble on the Glyndebourne stage. For my money, the youthful Salvatore Baccaloni is the finest Leporello on disc. And Louise Helletsgruber, that best of Cherubinos, is very good as Donna Elvira. John Brownlee is the smoothest and most seductive among the handfull of truly great Don Giovannis.

I would like merely to emphasize the astonishing dramatic quality of this recording. I have heard other performerrs outshine those here from a purely musical point of view.. But never a recording (of any work) that gave a better sensation of the operatic performance.

One of the earliest of the staple "Don Giovanni" recordings. I have been listening to this recording non stop for the past few weeks now, and it continues to surprise me. Despite being an older recording, the quality is excellent thanks to the work of the brilliant Ward Marston (any time you see his name on a remastered recording, you know the work is top-notch). He knows how to clean up the sound without distorting or destroying it. At the price Naxos offers, there should be nothing to keep this out of anyone's collection, even if you already have a few recordings of this opera. The primary cast is excellent, and I have been especially pleased to listen to the beautifully high-voiced Don Ottavio on this disc--generally the sound of Ottavios on other great recordings is weak at best (the Siepi recording suffers from this).

This is my favorite interpretation of the score. Maestro Busch seems to have captured precisely what Mozart intended in every bar. Passages that sound confused or banal or disjointed under other leaders suddenly make perfect sense in Busch's hands.

Other things I love about this recording: Brownlee's Don is truly noble and seductive. You really believe that his "La ci darem" could melt Zerlina's resolve (such as it is). And Baccaloni's old-style comical Leporello is a joy. I wish all singers handled the language the way he does -- you could almost take dictation from his Italian.

There are some negatives, as well. The sonics are, inevitably given the recording's date, pretty cobwebby. A more significant problem is the Donna Elvira, whose voice is just not up to the task. That leaves a rather sizable hole.

Still, the pluses far, far outweigh the negatives.