Depending on your point of view, Deutsche Grammophon’s decision, four years ago, to embark on a cycle of Mozart’s seven mature operas with Yannick Nézet-Séguin was either an act of over-ambitious commercial folly or a huge declaration of faith in the talent and prospects of a conductor who was rising rapidly through the international ranks. The recent announcement that Nézet-Séguin is to be the next music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera suggests that he has arrived, and no doubt gone a long way to reassure DG about the wisdom of its long-term investment, even if the results on disc have been less convincing.
Le Nozze di Figaro is the fourth release in this cycle. Like its predecessors – Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutte, and Die Entführung – it was taken from concert performances at the Baden-Baden summer festival; La Clemenza di Tito will be recorded there in July 2017. This Figaro shares the same characteristics as the previous sets. It has a glitzy, international cast, singers who may be very fine individually, but rarely give any hint in this performance of gelling into a group with a shared operatic purpose. Luca Pisaroni gives his performance of Figaro, Christiane Karg her Susanna, Thomas Hampson his Almaviva, and because they are experienced, intelligent performers, it all fits together plausibly enough, without having any real character of its own.
What’s not on offer, is anything new about this most familiar of all operas. There’s nothing particularly touching or amusing about it; even the second act’s miraculous finale doesn’t carry the charge it can in even the most modest stage performance. The conductor, rather than any of the singers, must take most of the responsibility for this blandness and lack of theatricality. The orchestra is once again the superb Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which can’t be faulted, but its immaculate playing seems only to reinforce the sense of something machine-like and impersonal. A fortepiano supplies continuo in the recitatives, and adds delicate traceries to some of the arias, but that’s the only concession to period performance. In every other respect the recording could have been made 40 years ago, and there are a number of versions of Figaro of that vintage that are far more satisfying.
