Mahler: Symphony No. 3.

THE ITALIANS of Mozart's time made a sharp distinction between opera buffa and opera seria. Mozart, in his two greatest operas, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, rose above boththough if they are comedy, it is only in Balzac's sense of comedie humaine. Le Nozze was roughly based on Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro, but from this Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, created what Stendhal described as a "sublime blend of wit and melancholy." The blend is such that it is sometimes hard to tell whether the music flowed from the libretto or vice versa.

In what Virgil Thomson has called the most touching pictures of eighteenth-century life, Le Nozze places masters and servants on the same level of human experience and folly. The stagecraft is artificial, but from it emerges great art and great commentary. Now a three-disc CD recording (L'Oiseau Lyre 421 333-2) by the Drottningholm Court Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, playing the instruments of the time and directed by Arnold Ostman, proves a point I have made in the past: that in Mozart's operas, good voices that meet in ensemble and good vocal acting make better music than one or two great show-off stars.

Mahler. A sadness of horns. The horns are there, and the sadness, too, in his rich and complex symphonies. He was perhaps the greatest conductor of his time, this Viennese Jew whose conversion to Catholicism brought him not peace but a further step along his own via dolorosa. Each new symphony seemed to be a stele on the road of misery he traveled, yet in each he expressed the grandeur and tragedy of the human condition and the need for God.

Mahler's Eighth is the apotheosis of his writing, but all his symphonies form a continuum. We are getting them now on compact disc, which, one might say, was invented for the great tonal masses and the sudden dynamics of his work. I commend to you therefore his No. 3 with the London Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas (CBS M2K 44553); No. 4 with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa (Philips 422 072-2); and No. 5 with the Vienna Philharmonic under Lorin Maazel (CBS MDK 44782). Here are three orchestras and conductors of different voice and manner, yet the powerful and resounding declaration of Mahler levels them. Play them one after the other and do not cavil over interpretation. They are of a pieceand magnificent. The very thinness of Mahler's melodic invention becomes a virtue in our enjoyment of what he does with each theme.