Tutto Mozart!
(Deutsche Grammophon)
Just when you think that you have taken your fill from the musical banquet laid out in honour of Mozart, another essential course is proffered to your barely cleansed palate.
Tutto Mozart! is the latest album from Bryn Terfel, the bass baritone whose chameleon-like capacity for vocal characterisation is shown at its best here. Backed by Sir Charles Mackerras conducting a very modern Scottish Chamber Orchestra with brisk period sound, this is a welcome return to the more serious side of the unashamedly popular recording fold that this superlative singer has been inhabiting.
Tutto Mozart? Well, not quite “tutto!” as the jaunty exclamation mark suggests. Certainly not “Basta!” or “enough!” as the Italians would say, either, especially if you like your operas complete. Indeed, after listening to the blistering bite of Terfel’s opening Non più andrai you can’t help but want to hear his richly toned, magnetic Figaro in its wonderful entirety.
It’s the same with his irresistible Don Giovanni, the duet Là ci darem la mano with the soprano Miah Persson’s honeyed Zerlina an exercise in text-book seduction, as he whispers: “Quel casinetto è mio”. Any Zerlina would gladly believe every last word. Like dividing leaves in this operatic repertoire are a number of concert arias, including the dramatic Così Dunque Tradisci.
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Terfel also manages to throw in a few of what Deutsche Grammophon boldly calls “role debuts” — after all, he has spent the last year bagging all the major bass roles left in the canon, from his 21st-century Wotan at Covent Garden to the Italianate and voluptuously evil Scarpia against Angela Gheorghiu’s Tosca last month.
Why not Mozartian, then, and the rather incongruous addition to this list, as Tutto Mozart! brings us Terfel pap-pap-papping through his first Papageno — a lightly sung foil to the more viscous darkness of his Don Giovanni. It may be piecemeal, but Terfel’s genius is to contour so fulsomely every nook of Mozart’s considerable bass baritone repertoire.
Tutto Mozart? Tutto Terfel? That’ll do.
SARAH JONES