Mozart: Cosi Fan Tutte.

I HAVE BEEN listening to a recording of Mozart's Piano Concerto in E Flat (K. 482), which, by coincidence, was sent to me from Italy by Jon Carter, a devoted enthusiast of soloist and conductor Paul Badura-Skoda, just as I was preparing to review a new Cosi Fan Tutte. I say "by coincidence" because Badura-Skoda's finely wrought rendition of Mozart's most famous concerto underscores what the critic Edward Dent wrote some five decades ago--that the concerto form was a "deliberate adaptation of the grand operatic aria," with voice against ensemble becoming instrument against orchestra.

Mozart's greatest and most personal musical utterances were in opera and the concerto. But it is significant and interesting that Mozart, having drawn his orchestral voice from opera, returned the compliment by injecting into his operatic works the devices of symphonic expression. On his stage, each scene is developed with the logic of the symphonist, heightening the dramatic and musical impact. His finales are completely orchestral, the joined voices used as instruments with little thought to the words that are being sung. To this, of course, Mozart added his exquisite sense of melody, of the melodic line, which reached its apotheosis in the "Et incarnatus est," the heart-piercing arioso of the Great Mass in C Minor.

The success of this marriage of the vocal and the orchestral rings out especially in that superlative trio--Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte. Here Mozart was blessed by the felicities of Lorenzo da Ponte, a librettist of deep dramatic and comic sensibility, who gave these works much of their psychological bite, and Mozart the structure on which to display his operatic genius. Oddly, Cosi, the most "symphonic" of the three, though it has its share of great lyrical moments, was relegated to the dustbin for some one hundred years. Perhaps its satiric jab at the inconstancy of woman and its corollary suggestion that fidelity may be a tiresome virtue had something to do with this, at least during the Victoria age.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. Now solidly back in the operatic repertory, Cosi Fan Tutee has received a number of fine recordings, with those of Georg Solti and Colin Davis pre-emiment. Now Angel-EMI has released its own version of the opera, with Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Chorus (DSCX 3940). The soloists are not the greatest, but their voices are well balanced--a matter of prime importance in an opera like Cosi, which relies so much on ensemble singing. I would say that this Angel recording is primus inter pares, and the credit goes to Muti. The conductor plays a greater role in Cosi than in, say, Don Giovanni, and Muti's conducting is crips, eloquent, excellently paced, and never allows the sometimes overlong recitatives to drag. Under Muti, the opera dances, which is what Mozart would have wanted.