The production is essentially a stage one, but adapted for a television studio. It’s colorful but simple, and heartfelt and lovable to a quite exceptional degree. Horst Stein conducts the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra in a vivid accompaniment, and the chorus of the Hamburg State Opera completes the lineup.
Well, not quite completes. William Workman makes a memorably congenial Papageno, and, most remarkable of all, Cristina Deutekom is a very striking Queen of the Night. Her shining, razor-sharp tones are a wonder, and it’s no surprise to learn that she’d sung the same role at the Met three years earlier. The Mozart specialist Edith Mathis is Pamina.
This, in other words, was no hole-in-
the-corner, provincial production but a
major coming together of significant talents. Its reissue is typical of what dedicated European DVD publishers searching the archives can achieve.
The Newcastle-born superstar Sting has for a long time been incorporating music in the classical tradition into his music. His latest CD, If on a Winter’s Night ..., does indeed contain classically influenced tracks, notably an item from Purcell’s opera King Arthur, the last song from Schubert’s Winterreise and a song inspired by the Sarabande in Bach’s Sixth Cello Suite.
The essential ambiance, though, is of a group of friends playing acoustic instruments at Sting’s hidey-hole in Tuscany, accompanying songs celebrating winter. “There is something in winter that is primal, mysterious and profoundly beautiful,” Sting writes, “as if we need the darkness of the winter months to replenish our inner spirits as much as we need the light, energy and warmth of the summer.” The CD, incidentally, is manufactured in Taiwan.
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