This recording of Die Entfuhrung was made in 1966, issued on the continent the next year but in England only in 1970, and now it has found its way on to CD. Josef Krips was always a sound and unaffected conductor of Mozart, and he directs here a cool, highly professional performance, light in its textures; two or three tempos struck me as unusually slow, but generally it moves along pretty well. In line with common German opera-house practice at the time Belmonte's last aria, ''Ich baue ganz'', is dropped, and his Act 2 aria is moved to the beginning of Act 3 to take its place. The spoken dialogue is radically shortened.
There is some good singing. Anneliese Rothenberger makes a soft-grained Konstanze, without quite the steel in her voice that we look to for defiance in ''Martern aller Arten''; there is some intensity but not much force. In the slow arias she is quite touching. The young Lucia Popp makes a spirited Blonde, not as perfect in control as she was soon to become but fully as charming and spirited, with no excess of pertness. Of the men, I admired much about Nicolai Gedda's singing, which is beautifully clean and controlled and has a certain style and elegance; but here and there the sound is a shade hard, and it doesn't really add up to an interesting interpretation, lacking somewhat in warmth and flexibility. Excellent characterizations come from both the other two principals—the Bacchus duet is one of the best things in the set—and there are some good, resonant low notes from Frick, a well tried and unexaggerated Osmin as well as spirited singing from Unger's Pedrillo. But as AB pointed out in his original review, both voices had seen even better days. Still, these performances have some lessons in style to offer many of those who sing the roles today, especially as regards the balance between real singing and comic licence.
The recording sounds rather dated, shallow and two-dimensional, by present-day standards, though clear enough. The voices are well-favoured by the engineers. I don't think that this reissue affects the comparative situation, on which I wrote in April and won't waste space by repeating myself, except to say, in summary, that I find the Harnoncourt version (Teldec/ASV) highly contrived and unstylish and would rather recommend either the Bohm (DG) or—to my taste the liveliest and most musicianly now available—the Davis (Philips).'