Memory has a trick of losing the good, the nice and the normal, and retaining only the oddities, which then swell into grotesque self-caricatures. So, taking a preliminary mental survey of Solti's Die Zauberflote, I recalled stingingly fierce sforzandos in the Overture, accomplished contortions in the Queen of Night's passage-work, a craggily gigantic Sarastro, and the whole thing punctuated by claps of thunder whose every onset threatened a heart attack. Reality, of course, proves much less extreme. The sforzandos do jab too insistently but as a whole the Overture is finely played, with its due complement of majesty and mystery, energy and grace. Cristina Deutekom certainly produces a curious effect as she juggles with the scales and triplets, staccati and altissimi of her arias; however, her accuracy and firmness earn gratitude, while the strange cold glitter of her tone characterizes aptly. As for Talvela's Sarastro, its phrases are often rough-hewn, but there is rich magnificence in the ample range, the notes themselves and the authority of utterance. The thunder, roaring lions and all else in the producer's effects department take their places quite naturally, and from the background (or what memory had relegated to the background) emerges a wide assortment of pleasures, partly a matter of individual performances, but adding up to a highly viable, competitive account of the opera, its cohesiveness and conviction enhanced by transfer to CD.
Of the two CD recordings heard in comparison, Sir Colin Davis's on Philips survives less well. Its glory is the Sarastro of Kurt Moll, by whose side Talvela's grandeur is of a rougher kind altogether. Davis's Pamina is Margaret Price, vocal gold in comparison with the often tremulous tone of Lorengar with Solti. Nevertheless, Price sounds too mature and sometimes too tubular in production; Mathis, with Karajan (DG), is the best of these. Solti has an excellent, manly Papageno in Hermann Prey, where Davis's Mikael Melbye is irritatingly twee. Solti also has probably the best of the Taminos: Stuart Burrows gives a genuinely fine performance, with a fresh ring to the voice (recorded in 1969), a stronger character than Araiza (Karajan) and a more consistenly graceful finish to his singing than Schreier (Davis). The secondary parts maintain the standard, and the recording, with voices given more prominence than on the later ones, has space and clarity. Solti's direction of the opera has sometimes been found too restless: once the Overture is over, I can hear little to substantiate the criticism, whereas his feeling for excitement is a great asset in this opera where a very slight excess of solemnity or relaxation can be deadly.'