Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro. - sound recording reviews

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Ralph De Toledano

* That commedia per musica, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, adjures us that the profane, too, has virtues - and many of them. The Nozze is as full of light as Mozart's other great opera, Don Giovanni, is cast in shadows. For Giovanni, which too many associate with Leporello's Madamina aria, taps lightly on the door of Hell, whereas the Nozze, in which Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto might well be compared to one by Lorenz Hart, sparkles and laughs and patents all the tricks with which the musical-comedy stage of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties was invested.

"Se a caso, madama," which heralds things to come shortly after the curtain rises, could have been resurrected in The Boys from Syracuse. The rousing "Non piu andrai," which I bellowed out to troops on Army marches when posteriors were dragging and the weaker men had fallen by the wayside, remains a summation of the Selective Service Act. And there is loveliness in the "Voi che sapete," which, though it does not rival Giovanni's "La ci darem la mano," still says it. It is wonderfully done - among the finest of operas - in Sony's recording by the Orchestra & Coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, conducted with brio by Zubin Mehta.