December 1997

Don Giovanni (1787) - Bryn Terfel (Don Giovanni); Michele Pertusi (Leporello); Mario Luperi (Commendatore); Renée Fleming (Donna Anna); Herbert Lippert (Don Ottavio); Ann Murray (Donna Elvira); Monica Groop (Zerlina); Roberto Scaltriti (Masetto); London Voices; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Georg Solti - Decca 455 500-2 - three discs 163:05 DDD

A lot of the singing here has a wonderfully healthy bloom, as if the cast had just come out of the vocal equivalent of a gym. It's also Sir Georg Solti's last opera recording. But is this opera, of all operas, meant to be heard as beautiful music sung with polish and dispatch? Not that Solti's recording based on two live performances at the Royal Festival Hall is so immaculate: the perfectly decent Ottavio of Herbert Lippert is quite untidy in some of the florid passage-work of "Il mio tesoro". And the pianissimo of the second stanza in the Don's serenade is wildly excessive, if not virtually inaudible.

But this is a cast to conjure with. And Solti brought his usual familiar combination of control and edginess, with the LPO lending that conventional, full orchestral sound now so out of fashion. Not much sense of period style, therefore, unless one means of the 1940s and '50s when Solti emerged as an operatic interpreter in Munich and Frankfurt. At various points Solti holds up the pace something rotten to manage an awkward corner in the score. There's no question that in the vocal Olympics of today both Bryn Terfel (Giovanni) and Renée Fleming (Anna) are gold medallists.

But behind its superficial attractions this is really a profoundly disappointing interpretation, at the same time hurried and homogenized, with almost no sense of what Solti thought it all meant - if any-thing apart from words and notes. Solti was famously a man of the theatre, but there's no sense of the conflicting motivations of this most complex and challenging opera. At least if it had been based on a proper staged production they would have to have been at least marginally investigated.

Of course, it is not easy to be emotionally accurate about the am-bivalent portraits that Mozart painted with Da Ponte here. Musically this is a performance on automatic pilot. Interpretative decisions about appropriate speeds and attitudes are based on musical convenience. But for a recording of Don Giovanni with the interest and pleasure promised by this casting (and Michele Pertusi as Leporello sets a marvelous example of Italian enunciation reasonably followed elsewhere) the interpretation needs to recognize that this is a metaphysical drama, not just a whirl of alluring, fabulously turned and mixed-up melodies and accompaniments. It's also a fascinating and extraordinary comedy - little comic vitality gets on the recording. Sir Georg for all his capabilities did not have much comic vision, or much of a sense of humor. Fabulous ingredients, they must have thought at Decca - but they don't add up.

- Tom Sutcliffe