Mozart: Idomeneo [Blu-ray]

Great Performances
Great performances: orchestra, conductor and soloists. Glyndebourne productions are always fascinating. Trevor Nunn's direction first-rate.

DVD quality is fine. Video and audio quality excellent considering this is a 1983 analogue source.

Good performances, but very old fashioned presentation.
For reasons unknown, Amazon has linked Mr. Nine's outstanding review of the Munich production of Idomeneo to this 1983 Glyndebourne production.
The performance under review was staged in London in 1983, conducted by Bernard Haitink, Philip Langridge in the titlerole, Jerry Hadley as (tenor-version)Idamante, Yvonne Kenny as Ilia and Carol Vaness as Electra.
The sets are period and the tempi is rather stolid (alas, Haitink could have been more enlivened in all the lengthy recitatives), but the performances are otherwise very solid, and in many places on the exalted side.
In the title role, seasoned British tenor Philip Langridge did not own the timbre required of Idomeneo (like Richard Croft for Jacobs), but here he sang in great style with impeccable acting skills. The arias are uncut, including the great 'Fuor del mar', with a great delivery by Langridge. However, Langridge was rather tame in the lengthy recitatives and this was not assisted one jot by Haitink's...

Dull staging but fine performances
Mozart had already written twelve operas by the time he was commissioned to write Idomeneo for Munich in 1780 (his earliest opera written when he was just eleven years old), and although many of those earlier works show moments of the talent and genius that would flourish in later years and are often astonishingly accomplished considering the age of the composer, they are mostly conventional in nature. It's generally accepted that Mozart's mature opera works commence with Idomeneo, composed when he was 25 years old, but written to the dictates of the opera seria style that was even then considered outdated, the implication is often that it's among the composer's lesser works. Viewed rather as the peak of the youthful Mozart rather than the beginning of his maturity, Idomeneo is however remarkably innovative and thoroughly unique in its treatment of the opera seria style with that distinctive graceful character that the composer brings to the work.

What is fascinating...

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