I was saying yesterday that Mozart is the Shakespeare of music. He’s got me out of many’s the scrape over the years; it started with Bergman’s Magic Flute when I was 14, and went through various things till eventually I came to realise it’s Cosà I keep going back to. This isn’t by a very long stretch my favourite Fiordiligi (sorry Miah); but the other videos are either fuzzy, or out of sync, or the Ferrando is terrible, or some combination of those things. Elisabeth Schwartzkopf would have made a great post to follow the P****ski fracas, of course, and she is by far the best Mozart soprano – anyone else who comes close does so only insofar as they sound a bit like her – but there’s no actual footage, only still photos. And anyway we won’t go into that, shall we!
Anyway, this is Miah Persson and Topi Lehtipuu, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, at Glyndebourne in 2006, and I think it’s exciting. It’s also the moment where the human complexity gets dark. But it’s Mozart: redemption is not far off.
By the way, for any Me & the Dead geeks out there: this is the aria that’s in my poem Cosà fan Tutte. One reason this video is good is that it gives you the beginning of the scene so you can see how shocking the duet is.
(An aside: Schwarzkopf, on being asked about Peter Sellars – the director, not Peter Sellers: “There are names I do not want mentioned in my home. Do not say that name in my presence. I have seen what he has done…” Ha!)
1 Comment
October 5, 2009 at 3:03 am
This post sent me running to listen to my live 1956 La Scala Schwarzkopf ‘Cosi’. Thanks for the nudge.