Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gypsy Princess) is one of the pinnacles of Viennese operetta and perhaps the only major entry in the genre to debut in the midst of World War I.
Yvonne Kenny, Michael Roider, and the Slovak Philharmonic Choir and Radio Symphony Orchestra under legendary operetta specialist
Richard Bonynge combine their efforts in this well-realized Naxos release of Imre Kálmán's Die Csárdásfürstin. The singing all around is very good, and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra pulls through this bouncy and deceptively difficult score admirably, though it occasionally shows signs of being winded and weary at the ends of particularly long scenes.
Complete recordings of Die Csárdásfürstin are not exactly thick on the ground, at least in non-German speaking countries. Yet there have been some, at least going back to an early stereo LP issued on the American label Period in 1958. In the CD era, it is possible, with some trimming, to squeeze a representative Die Csárdásfürstin onto a single disc. Here, Naxos decided to put away the trimming shears and instead bring in some rare music from other never-heard Kálmán stage productions added to the end of the second disc. These little filler pieces, taken from works ranging from 1917 to 1932, are completely charming and add considerable value to the two-disc set as a whole. Naxos cuts an additional corner by making the libretto accessible on its website, rather than adding extra pages to the booklet to accommodate it. Naxos is marketing parallel incarnations of Die Csárdásfürstin in a standard CD format and as a Super Audio CD. The SACD format is to be preferred over the standard CD, which by comparison is a little hollow and dull-sounding.