Sony Classical announces a further batch of complete recordings from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor catalogues. The newest installment of this popular series features some unusual repertoire as well as documents of the New York Metropolitan Opera in its postwar heyday. Mozart’s Figaro is here too, sung by “a delightfully fresh-sounding” Michele Pertusi (BBC Music Magazine) in Zubin Mehta’s 1992 recording of Le nozze di Figaro with the Maggio Musicale of Florence. The BBC reviewer lauded “Mehta’s energising sense of pace and colour [and] consistently good orchestral playing,” and Gramophone was also highly enthusiastic, writing that it “sounds like the performers were enjoying themselves. Save the Countess and Susanna, they’re all Italians (oddly rare on disc). This lends bubbling virtuosity to the Italian librettist’s exchanges for Lucio Gallo’s Count and Michele Pertusi’s Figaro…And both Karita Mattila [the Countess] and Marie McLaughlin [Susanna] are so at home with their mistress/servant roles.”

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REVIEW:

Zubin Mehta leads this modern-instrument performance that features characterful individual performances and an unusual variant of the Count’s aria for the vivid Lucio Gallo.

– BBC Music Magazine