Mozart: Don Giovanni – Klemperer

Klemperer never conducted a fast Don Giovanni, and by the time EMI got him into Kingsway Hall for this recording he was well past the point of apologizing for it. What he offers instead is architecture. Each phrase is weighed, set down, allowed to resonate before the next arrives — an approach that could easily calcify into pomposity but somehow, more often than not, breathes.

The overture announces the terms immediately: granite-faced, unhurried, the D-minor chords landing like doors closing in a great stone hall. There is nothing playful here, nothing of the buffa lightness some conductors chase. Klemperer is telling you, before a note of the drama proper has sounded, that this opera’s subtitle — dramma giocoso — will tilt hard toward the dramma. Fine. Mozart can bear the weight. Not every director trusts that he can.

The bonus disc is the real news of this reissue, and it is a small delight — rehearsal tapes and playback sessions, newly remastered, that EMI had sat on for decades. Here is the octogenarian Klemperer, slow of speech as he was slow of tempo, correcting the orchestra’s pronunciation of his Don’s name — “Ghia-u-rov,” he insists, syllable by syllable, with the patience of a man who has stopped caring how long anything takes. There is dry wit buried in these exchanges too, delivered so flatly you almost miss it. Historically this is gold. Musically it tells you everything about the temperament that shaped the rendition you’re about to hear.

That performance itself — the opera proper — has not been retouched; we are still listening to the 1991 remastering, not a new one, and it shows its age slightly in the upper strings, a touch of glare EMI’s engineers of that era never quite banished. No matter. The voices come through with plenty of bloom.

Nicolai Ghiaurov, still climbing toward the peak of his international career, sings a Don Giovanni of dark, oiled, seductive tone — this is a nobleman who could talk his way into anyone’s bedroom on timbre alone, never mind the words. Walter Berry’s Leporello is sterner than most, less mercurial, more put-upon manservant than sly comic engine, but he points text with the precision of a man who had already sung this role — and would sing it again — under multiple batons; his experience shows in every line-reading, every muttered aside. Franz Crass, Böhm’s Sarastro not long before this, makes a sonorous if somewhat faceless Commendatore — sonorous, yes, but he doesn’t summon the seismic dread Gottlob Frick brings to Giulini’s set, where the stone guest genuinely seems to shake the floorboards.

Paolo Montarsolo’s Masetto has real snap and color, a buffo bass who knows exactly how much comedy the drama can absorb without cracking. And Nicolai Gedda — Klemperer’s Tamino a few seasons earlier — brings more steel to Don Ottavio than the role usually gets, without sacrificing an ounce of the finesse that was always his calling card. “Dalla sua pace” is sung with such honeyed legato you forget how thankless this part usually is on record; tenors either oversweeten it or vanish into it, and Gedda does neither.

Claire Watson’s Donna Anna matches him in stature — a strong, unfussy, dramatically alert reading, and her female colleagues hold their own beside her without difficulty.

Where does this leave the set among the mountain of rival Giovannis? Not at the summit — Giulini’s 1959 album still has more theatrical electricity, Fricks’ Commendatore alone worth the price of admission — but Klemperer’s reading has something few others attempt: gravity treated as a virtue rather than a liability. It is not everyone’s Mozart. It may not even be my Mozart on every listening. But it is completely, unmistakably itself, and in a catalog crowded with interchangeable performances that is worth more than critics sometimes admit.

Recommended, then — with the rehearsal disc alone nearly justifying the purchase for anyone who cares how this particular musical mind actually worked.