Sooner or later there must be a new recording of Doktor Faust: it is an opera great enough to need the varying perspectives of different interpretations. And besides, Antony Beaumont has demonstrated that Philipp Jamach's completion of the final scene is, at the very least, an incomplete realization of Busoni's intentions- Beaumont's own solution deserves the currency of a recording. No less urgently, Leitner's DG account, pioneering though it was and eloquent advocacy though it remains, is quite extensively cut: 12 passages are excised, 700 bars in all, including most of the church scene and its organ prelude, three fine orchestral passages (including the very beautiful transformation music before the vision of Helen of Troy) and the first three sections of the students' serenade. These trimmings were made necessary, no doubt, by a prudent desire to get the opera on to three LPs, it is tough luck on DG that the resultant timing makes it just marginally too long for two CDs.
Until someone takes the risk of a new version, though, this one will remain an essential document, and although recent productions in London and elsewhere have demonstrated that the casting of Doktor Faust is not insuperably difficult any future recording will be hard put to it to match Fischer-Dieskau's magnificently authoritative interpretation of the title role or DG's luxurious casting of the 'secondary' parts (Sotin, Rintzler Grundheber, Schmidt and de Ridder as the five 'spirit voices'!). Cochran is not the most ingratiating Mephistopheles imaginable, but his intelligence and his fearless scaling of the cruelly high tessitura ensure that he is malignancy incarnate. Intelligent, too, is Hillebrecht's Duchess, but her voice is worn and imperfectly controlled. This is the only real vocal disappointment, however, and there are none in Leitner's direction of Busoni's score, that magic box of lucidly complex invention and mysterious sonorities.
The recording sounds very well for its age, too, with a good sense of space and with on-stage, offstage and in-the-orchestra choruses (very well sung) carefully distinguished, only the usual forward placing of the solo voices detracts from the impression of a real performance. Does it sound too much of a back-hander to say that I earnestly recommend this set despite urgently looking forward, not to its successor but to its first rival?'