Mozart: Cosi Fan Tutte Complete Opera Box Set - 2CDs with Libretto Booklet - Perfect for Classical Music Lovers & Opera Enthusiasts - Great for Home Listening, Gifts & Music Collections

For more than a century after Mozart's death, this brilliant musical drama was the most neglected of his operas, its plot condemned on moral grounds (wife swapping was, after all, not a custom in good standing in the 19th century). If it was produced, the plot was bowdlerized, some numbers were dropped and some composers even provided replacements. It was not until the 20th century that the original version occasionally re-appeared on stage, and only in the post-WWII world that the world began to accept Cosi as the outstanding composition it is. True, Don Giovanni will always be acknowledged as Mozart's operatic masterpiece, in large part because of the succession of masterpieces it contains; but today Cosi is recognized as a dramatic creation equal to Giovanni, if in slightly different ways.Mozart's exceptional reliance on ensembles in this opera, with its consequent downplaying of arias, marked his final departure from the conventions of earlier 18th-century Italian opera buffa. He had announced this direction in the stupefying first-act finale to Figaro, and pursued the trend with the dauntingly complex ensembles of Don Giovanni; but in Cosi's unprecedented and uninterrupted lineup of 7 successive ensembles after the curtain rises, he departed once and for all from the traditions that allowed arias to dominate the operatic stage.We have here, in Karl Bohm's lustrous 1963 reading, a recording fit in every way to embody what Mozart created in sound. Whatever it was that happened in the studio while this reading was in progress was unique, matchless. Not only did Bohm have the exceptional resources of the Philharmonia Orchestra and his own acknowledged Mozart expertise; he had a cast for the ages. Everything came together and resulted in a silken, caressing performance that has consistently led the field since its release. The sound has come through the transfer from vinyl to CD with exceptional clarity and warmth, and the voices are as fine in this version as they were in the original.Elizabeth Schwarzkopf's Fiordiligi was one of her standout roles, one of the few on which she concentrated throughout the 1960s, and her mastery of it (born, one must think, of particular affection for it) shows here. No one has ever handled the role, with its forbiddingly wide skips, as masterfully as she. I doubt anybody ever will again. Christa Ludwig often sang Dorabella in performance with Schwarzkopf, and their shared partnership in the roles is clearly evident here; a matchup unequaled in any other opera recording I know. As the two officers engaged to the sisters, Alfredo Kraus and Giuseppe Taddei offer both shamelessly caressing readings of their roles as they attempt to seduce each others' fiancees, and convincingly express their anger and dismay upon "discovering" that the ladies have betrayed them. It's too bad we have heard so little of Hanny Steffek apart from this recording; she handles the broadly comic role of Despina beautifully, a tribute to her early training in Munich where she began by singing smaller roles (e.g., Barberina in Figaro) and progressed to the major parts. As Don Alfonso, the two officers' cynical older friend, Walter Berry (Christa Ludwig's then-husband) is impressive in every turn and appoggiatura.The only flaws in this production are minor and consist entirely of the internal cuts in some numbers that were standard at the time the recording was made. (If you want a note-complete version, get hold of the one in EMI's Complete Mozart Edition, which restores all internal cuts and the few numbers that were formerly omitted in performance.) I cannot recommend this recording highly enough.