Baritone Christian Gerhaher has a rare combination of warm, rounded, almost Fischer-Dieskau-esque tone and dramatic sense, and he's rapidly gaining admirers. An album of Mozart arias would seem just the thing for him, and the straightforward title of this release seems to promise just that. As it happens, things are a little more complicated. You get notes entitled "The Transformations of Eros in Mozart's Final Operas" (that sounds even more fearsome in German), which seems to mean that the program explores different kinds of Mozartian male romantic leads, from Don Giovanni (both the Don himself and Leporello) to Figaro (the Count also gets his say) to Guglielmo in Così fan tutte to Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. Arias from each opera are grouped, and between them are single arias that perhaps show the way one concept of the Mozart-era lover bled into another. On top of this, the four movements of Mozart's Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425 ("Linz"), are interspersed around the program, not in their original order. These may have been interludes in the live concerts from which these recordings were taken. They were apparently picked by Gerhaher himself, but the first movement of the symphony as the next-to-last track seems to be beginning something and not ending it. The entire concept is murky, but nothing interferes with the sheer attractiveness of Gerhaher's singing and the way he shifts gears smoothly from the artless Papageno to the licentious Don Giovanni. As a plain old Mozart arias collection, this is just fine.
© TiVo