Mozart’s music has excel­lent and envi­able social skills — that is one of its aes­thetic val­ues. At it’s best, it seeks to please not by pan­der­ing or being super­fi­cially agree­able, but by sin­cerely express­ing charm, flu­ency, curios­ity, empa­thy, humor and the dis­play of com­mon bonds. It is dig­ni­fied but never stiff, it is witty and even vul­gar in mea­sures but never base — it has admirable poise every moment. It con­veys a great deal more, of course, but it greets us with an almost effer­ves­cent plea­sure with our com­pany and the desire to show us great and won­der­ful things about it and the world. Mozart’s mas­ter­pieces would be the hon­ored guest at a din­ner party who makes us laugh, fas­ci­nates us with dra­matic tales of con­flict and res­o­lu­tion, praises the host and the cook­ing extrav­a­gantly and hon­estly, never drinks too much, turns boor­ish or stays too long after desert and coffee.

Some of his great­est music is the opera “Idome­neo,” his first mature opera. The story is of the King of Crete, Idome­neo, saved from ship­wreck by Nep­tune and pledged to sac­ri­fice the first per­son he sees in trib­ute. The first per­son he see is, trag­i­cally, his son Idamante, him­self involved in a love tri­an­gle with Ilia and Elet­tra. The themes of duty and love are con­sis­tently impor­tant in the composer’s career and were per­son­ally deeply appeal­ing. These themes are always best explored in his operas, and “Idome­neo” does that spec­tac­u­larly, musi­cally. While it is not his great­est opera, his great­est com­bi­na­tion of writ­ten and musi­cal drama, the more I lis­ten to it the more I feel it is his great­est on a purely musi­cal basis, beyond that even of “Le Nozze di Figaro” or “Die Zauber­flote.” The music is rav­ish­ing and trans­port­ing, the vocal line and accom­pa­ni­ment unceas­ingly involv­ing, dra­matic, sur­pris­ing, com­pelling and inven­tive. Good opera writ­ing requires that the music con­vey the drama of the tale and the text, that it dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion moods, moments and espe­cially char­ac­ters, and in “Idome­neo” Mozart does this with inde­scrib­able bril­liance and suc­cess. The music so clearly defines each char­ac­ter, and so clearly describes their emo­tional states (this includes the music for the cho­rus), that a sen­si­tive lis­tener with no knowl­edge of the plot or Ital­ian is still left with a good idea of the shape and res­o­lu­tion of the opera. Beyond con­quer­ing that daunt­ing tech­ni­cal chal­lenge, the music is great in the ear and the heart; the love music charms, the bal­lads weep, the storms ter­rify and angers rage. In a form made for the stage and only infre­quently an unqual­i­fied suc­cess in audio for­mat, this is an ideal opera for lis­ten­ing again and again.

And so the new record­ing from con­duc­tor René Jacobs is wel­come. Jacobs is a for­mer singer who has become and excel­lent and impor­tant Early Music scholar and leader, and has already pro­duced out­stand­ing record­ings of “Figaro,” “La Clemenza di Tito,” “Cosi fan Tutte” and “Don Gio­vanni,” the last two the best Early Music style record­ings of those operas. His meth­ods are a con­trast to the other lead­ing Early Music con­duc­tor of Mozart operas, John Eliot Gar­diner; Jacobs tends towards a smaller, inti­mate sound and takes far greater lib­er­ties with the score than Gar­diner, who favors a a big­ger sound with more edge and drive and is con­sis­tently con­cerned with dis­cern­ing the fun­da­men­tal goals of the score and empha­siz­ing them. These are gross gen­er­al­iza­tions, of course, with many excep­tions, but the two con­duc­tors do pro­duce dif­fer­ent work and it is a strength of the Early Music approach that they both fit the philoso­phies of the move­ment and suc­ceed in their music-making. Gar­diner has already made an absolutely tremen­dous record­ing of “Idome­neo,” and so it is appro­pri­ate to dis­cuss this new one on that basis.

Both fea­ture deep ros­ters of excel­lent singers (as does the best of the ‘nor­mal’ record­ings, Sir Charles MacK­er­ras’ set on EMI with a lux­ury cast that includes Ian Bostridge, Lor­raine Hunt Lieber­son and Lisa Milne); Gardiner’s leads are Anthony-Rolfe John­son ad Anne-Sophie von Otter and Sylvia McNair, while Jacobs uses Richard Croft in the lead role, Bernarda Fink as Idamante, Sun­hae Im as Ilia and Alexan­d­rina Pen­datchan­ska as an aston­ish­ing Elet­tra. It’s a great credit to all three record­ings that the trouser-role of Idamante, which asks of our mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties a self-consciously will­ful sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, is nat­ural and eas­ily accept­able. On all three record­ings, the singers exe­cute the music with great skill and beauty and con­vey the char­ac­ters well — although Mozart must again be given credit for music that so clearly and pow­er­fully con­veys all the char­ac­ters’ mer­cu­r­ial thoughts and feel­ings. The character’s arias con­vey an enor­mous range of emo­tion, all in the most nat­ural sound­ing music; “Fuor del mar” expresses a bal­ance between thanks and anguish, the music for the famous quar­tet “Andro ramingo e solo” fits together beau­ti­fully while the char­ac­ters them­selves are full of doubts and con­flicts, and the cho­rus “Cor­ri­amo, fug­giamo” is a pow­er­fully effec­tive expres­sion of terror.

What dis­tin­guishes this set is Jacobs approach to the score. The sim­plis­tic way to char­ac­ter­ize Early Music per­for­mance prac­tice is to stress issues of tempo, i.e. every­thing is played much faster than in more com­mon, stan­dard approaches. That is broadly true but also mis­lead­ing. Jacobs over­ture is not only slower than Gardiner’s, but also con­sid­er­ably slower than Peter Maag’s record­ing. Else­where, Jacobs presses tem­pos faster. He seems to be mak­ing these deci­sions based on the musi­cal mate­r­ial itself, and what it is try­ing to con­vey. Elettra’s arias are an exam­ple; she is unhinged by jeal­ous fury in “Tutte nel cor vi sento” and “D’Oreste, d’Aiace,” and the music is played at just the edge of hang­ing together. It’s effec­tive and excit­ing. Jacob’s smaller ensem­ble, the Freiburger Barock­o­rch­ester, allows this, and it’s another inter­pre­tive choice. He pares down the num­ber of strings — there are only a dozen vio­lins — and pro­duces a sound that is closer to cham­ber music, with a com­plex blend of brit­tle, woody and throaty col­ors. He also has a lighter approach to phras­ing than both stan­dard prac­tice and Gar­diner; the string artic­u­la­tions are gen­tle, espe­cially in the ini­tial attack of notes, and there is a ten­dency towards greater legato play­ing, even in pas­sages marked stac­cato. If you feel that all of Mozart’s art aspire to singing and that the proper approach to play­ing his music is to empha­size a cantabile qual­ity — and I feel this way — then this is an ideal concept.

What makes this record­ing extra­or­di­nary are the recita­tives, and the conductor’s con­cep­tion for how they should be played. The score indi­cates pre­dom­i­nantly sus­tained long tones under the vocal part, and most con­duc­tors, includ­ing Gar­diner, present this straight and unem­bell­ished in the strings. Jacobs first aug­ments the recita­tives with a fortepi­ano and then uses the score to indi­cate the har­monic struc­ture for impro­vised con­tinuo accom­pa­ni­ment of the singers. On the Gar­diner record­ing, the recita­tive for Idome­neo and Arbace that opens the sec­ond act begins with a sus­tained chord in the strings, while the Jacobs record­ings presents an impro­vised fan­ta­sia on the fortepi­ano. The dif­fer­ence is star­tling, as if one is hear­ing some­thing that is no longer Mozart’s opera, but that is because of what has been a 100 years-long and inap­pro­pri­ate approach to music like this. As Jacobs writes in the book­let notes:

“The instru­men­tal accom­pa­ni­ment of the recita­tivi sem­plici calls for impro­vis­ing con­tinuo play­ers with an unceas­ing flow of ideas and a strong feel­ing for style. It is non­sense to think that Mozart him­self, an impro­viser of genius, would have played only ‘dry’ chords when accom­pa­ny­ing recita­tive, that he would not have ‘com­mented’ on the action from time to time as the strings and wind do in orches­trally accom­pa­nied recita­tives, that he would not have played a pre­lude at the start of an impor­tant recita­tive if he wanted to, and as the fortepi­anist in our record­ing dares to do at the begin­ning of the sec­ond act by para­phras­ing the end of the overture.”

He is not merely mak­ing a will­ful asser­tion, he is con­vey­ing an impor­tant truth about the com­poser, the era and music itself. The dis­tinc­tion between impro­vised and com­posed music is arti­fi­cial and mean­ing­less. Com­posed music, bet­ter under­stood as notated music, is impro­vised music that has been fixed at a moment in time and devel­op­ment by some kind of record­ing process, whether paper or cylin­der of mag­netic tape. It is a record of a moment meant to con­vey infor­ma­tion past the imme­di­ate vicin­ity of the com­poser, and also, often, to main­tain a record of infor­ma­tion which the com­poser may fur­ther manip­u­late. It is also, from the composer’s stand­point, impro­vi­sa­tion — it begins as such and remains so, even when recorded. Some­one is mak­ing it up in the moment, and many great com­posers were also great impro­vis­ers and musi­cians had to be able to impro­vise. This was lost, for com­plex rea­sons, in the 20th cen­tury, but is now return­ing thanks to musi­cians like Jacobs and Alfred Bren­del (who, for exam­ple, adds judi­cious and idiomatic impro­vi­sa­tion to his record­ing of the Mozart piano con­certo K. 488, which the com­poser would have expected of any decent performer).

While this approach will jar some lis­ten­ers, it gives great life and excite­ment to the music even beyond what Mozart left us in the score’s pages. What Jacobs is doing is arguably the most appro­pri­ate approach, a way of per­form­ing the music that fits as closely to what Mozart would have known and expected in his day. Those are very dif­fer­ent ideas than what we are used to in lis­ten­ing to record­ings of the past sev­eral gen­er­a­tions. It is unfa­mil­iar and char­ac­ter­ful — the pri­mary focus is on con­vey­ing the char­ac­ter of the music, rather than the notes them­selves — and so is per­haps less imme­di­ately acces­si­ble, but it rewards repeated lis­ten­ing. There is a real sense of human drama beyond the musi­cal drama, which makes the effect inti­mate and a bit dis­arm­ing. It really demands to be seen on stage — the opera con­cludes with a bal­let and Jacobs leads the music with a strict sense of dance, with clear and slightly stiff sep­a­ra­tion between the style of dance and tempo in each of the sec­tions. Gar­diner, on the other hand, plays the music in a more sym­phonic way, mak­ing it a com­plete work, a kind of large-scale reverse over­ture that musi­cally wraps up the entire work. It makes for more sat­is­fy­ing lis­ten­ing which suc­ceeds because we are expe­ri­enc­ing a record­ing, not wit­ness­ing and actual per­for­mance. His over­all approach is large scale, with every recita­tive, aria and cho­rus inte­grated into an over­all line and con­cep­tion, and he makes it work. Jacobs is work­ing his way from the bot­tom up, from inside the char­ac­ters and out, so musi­cally his record­ing is a bit choppy and more vivid. It is an ideal com­ple­ment to Gardiner’s set, and together they make won­der­ful book­ends to this won­der­ful opera (the Jacobs CD box comes with a forty-five minute doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the recording).