Ludwig Van Beethoven Beethoven: Fidelio / Overtures to Leonore Nos. 1 & 3, Fidelio

This interesting new Fidelio--one of over a dozen available--has a couple of things going very much in its favor, and a couple against it, too. A great pro is the leadership of Daniel Barenboim, who wrings from the orchestra and chorus fabulous playing and singing; just on a symphonic level, this is worth hearing. Barenboim also paces the work sensibly--those who do not like huge, glacial performances of this opera (i.e., fans of the superb Klemperer or various Furtwängler readings) or the "new school" of Beethoven conducting that seems to prefer racing through his music (occasionally in Gardiner or Harnoncourt) will welcome the inner tension Barenboim deeply understands in the music as well as his sympathy for his singers. This set grew out of a live performance in which all dialogue was cut and replaced, at times, with a flashback narration by Leonore. Here we get only the music Beethoven composed with no dialogue at all; the text Leonore spoke is printed in the accompanying booklet. It's not enough--one misses some dialogue, however brief and abbreviated, between numbers. This seems like a set of highlights without any. The quality of the soloists varies: Soile Isokoski and Werner Güra make a nice pair of youngsters; René Pape's Rocco is exactly the right combination of toady and good guy and he sings gloriously, and Falk Struckmann draws Pizarro villainously and manages his way around the difficult music. Domingo's Florestan is handsomely sung--almost too Italianately beautiful at times--but well thought through, and if not quite on the Jon Vickers level, certainly not terribly far away. Waltraud Meier's career continues to astonish. This pushed-up mezzo with an ugly tone has intelligence and passion in her voice, but the sound is curdled. Doesn't anyone notice that she sings off key and harshly half the time? So, a mixed bag: Domingo and Barenboim fans will need this, but it's like getting only a part of Fidelio (Barenboim, by the way, begins the opera with the Leonore Overture No. 2; an appendix includes the other three overtures Beethoven wrote for this work), and Meier is outclassed by every other Leonore on CD. Why not go for the recent Halasz reading on Naxos? It's good, it's cheap, and there's just enough dialogue to keep the plot intelligible. --Robert Levine