Mozart - La Clemenza di Tito
Kožená; Trost; Martinpelto
Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus; Scottish Chamber Orchestra / Mackerras
DG 477 5792 (2CD)

Release date February 2006

For most of its existance, La Clemenza di Tito has been a work more admired than loved. For Edward Dent (in his famous 1913 study of Mozart’s operas) it ”…can only be considered as a museum piece”. The great Mozart series at Glyndebourne during the 1930s, under the inspired direction of Fritz Busch, ignored Tito. Since the 1960s, it has undergone a reassessment, and performances are not as rare as once they were. In part, this has been due to the championship of Sir Charles Mackerras, whose intensely dramatic reading has been captured in a new recording for DG. One of the practical problems in performing Tito is what to do with the recitatives. They aren’t by Mozart (Tito was composed to a very tight deadline), and there are an awful lot of them. Sir Charles has taken a butcher’s knife to them, leaving just enough to further the action. (If you want to hear them complete, listen to Christopher Hogwood’s L’Oiseau-Lyre recording - I shouldn’t imagine that you’ll want to hear them very often, though!) Sir Charles’s cast is one of the strongest on record, led by Magdalena Kožená’s nervy Sesto. Kožená’s electrifying account of Parto, parto matches Cecilia Bartoli’s amazing performance for Hogwood; like Bartoli, Kožená’s voice is slim, but highly coloured, and her technique is formidable. Rainer Trost, a last-minute replacement for Ian Bostridge, makes a good fist of this dramatically rather uninteresting part. The cruel writing in Se all’impero, Amici Dei foxes him somewhat, but he and Sir Charles make something wonderfully buoyant of Ah, se fosse intorno al trono. As Vitellia, Hillevi Martinpelto occasionally sounds under strain (Julia Varady comes close to stealing the show in this role on John Eliot Gardiner’s recording), but Lisa Milne and Christine Rice (as Servilia and Annio respectively) are both superb – their tiny duet Ah, perdona al primo affetto is one of many little gems to be found in this set. In fact, Tito is largely an opera of tiny numbers – apart from the two finales, you don’t have great sweeps of music as you do in, for instance, Don Giovanni. It’s up to the performers to instantly create an atmosphere. Although the SCO is not a full-time opera orchestra, in Sir Charles’s hands it sounds as if it plays Mozart operas all of the time. As Leonard Bernstein once said of the Vienna Philharmonic, “they can turn on a dime”. The solo work, especially from Maximiliano Martin and Ruth Ellis in the arias with basset clarinet and basset horn, is magnificent. Tito’s marvellous, Handel-inspired choruses are among the glories of the work, and the SCO Chorus sings them fervently, in good Italian. DG’s recorded sound is near-ideal, with the voices unclouded by the Usher Hall’s generous acoustic. This, along with Gardiner’s superb live recording for Archiv, is the most recommendable version of Mozart’s final operatic masterpiece currently on the market.

Sandy Matheson