Mozart, After the Deluge

It’s been four years since the Mozart deluge: the 200th anniversary of his death and all its attendant excess. Happily, the recording companies have slowed down their Mozart-sausage-making machine to give us, since the heedless, quantity- uber-Alles days of 1991, a good deal of thoughtful, even needed Mozart, most recently devoting considerable attention to “Le Nozze di Figaro.”

With John Eliot Gardiner, who conducts his period-instrument English Baroque Soloists orchestra and employs many aspects of what has come to be regarded as authentic period style, e.g., the use of vocal appoggiaturas, the music sounds like Mozart, the drama like Da Ponte (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv 439 871, 3 CDs), which is to say light, energetic and mobile, but with a cutting edge to its comedy.

With Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the modern-instrument Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, disdaining appoggiaturas and other vocal decoration, we are apparently meant to ponder the actions of some angry, not at all amusing people (Teldec 90861, 3 CDs).

In each instance, the overture telegraphs the conductor’s broader intentions. Gardiner’s is swift, pointed, agile, Harnoncourt’s slower, heavier, bass-oriented.

With their opening duet, Gardiner’s Figaro (Bryn Terfel) and Susanna (Alison Hagley) establish not only their affectionate relationship to each other but also their relationship to their employer, the Count, a man in need of wising-up--by them.

Harnoncourt’s pair, Anton Scharinger and Barbara Bonney, sound subdued at the outset and downright grim by their second duet, which discusses the Count’s lecherous intentions. This is to be a dark “Figaro,” driven by the conflict between oppressed working folk and their leisured oppressor, the Count.

Harnoncourt hammers his points home throughout the opera with exasperatingly frequent tempo changes and portentous punctuations by the horns, stressing and exaggerating Mozart’s harmonic ingenuity at the expense of his wit.

Under the circumstances, the singers’ attempts at characterization never penetrate.

Not to belabor the point, Mozart’s “comedia per musica” is both funny and pertinent under Gardiner while it has rarely seemed less a comedy as in Harnoncourt’s hands, with even the usually enlivening presence of Thomas Hampson as the Count failing to generate much of a dramatic spark.

Terfel, while perhaps too anxious to strut his stylistic stuff (he ornaments his part more lavishly than the other singers) possesses a voice of broad range and admirable flexibility, while Hagley is a worldly but not overly pert Susanna. Rodney Gilfry is a believably youthful and attractive, and therefore exceptionally dangerous Count, while Pamela Helen Stephen projects an appealing Cherubino.

Hillevi Martinpelto’s soprano hasn’t quite the steadiness of line for an ideal Countess, but Gardiner’s supple, somewhat faster than usual pacing enables her to project a touchingly fragile character, where Harnoncourt’s sluggishness imposes unnecessary problems of breathing and articulation on his Countess, Charlotte Margiono.

In short, Gardiner’s edition is a valuable addition to the catalogue, a “Figaro” that wears its scholarship lightly while stressing the grace and humanity of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaboration. Harnoncourt’s, on the other hand, is a curiosity: “Figaro” as a drama of alienation, populated by victims and schemers.

A standout among recent instru mental recordings has Mozart scholar Robert Levin making one of his too-infrequent appearances as a pianist: an irresistible coupling of the Concertos in E-flat, K. 271, and A, K. 414, in which his playing is handsomely complemented by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music (L’Oiseau-Lyre 443 328).

Levin’s immensely vital readings, on a pingy reproduction of a 1785 Stein instrument of the kind Mozart favored, give us both the surface glitter and the darker undercurrents of these scores.

Claudio Abbado’s Mozartean sympathies have hardly been apparent in past recorded outings. And they may remain suspect in his latest encounter with his music (Sony 48385).

Still, there’s much to enjoy here, in works requiring more drive than finesse, and which benefit from the superb execution of the Berlin Philharmonic: the “Paris” Symphony, K.297 (including both versions of the slow movement), the three-movement symphony drawn from the “Posthorn” Serenade, the ferocious “little” G-minor Symphony, K. 183, and a Masonic Funeral Music more evocative of rites for a Wagnerian hero than one of Mozart’s lodge brothers.