La clemenza di Tito is a 127-minute studio album of the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by Dame Janet Baker, Stuart Burrows, Robert Lloyd. Yvonne Minton, Lucia Popp and Frederica von Stade with the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. It was released in 1977.
Background
The album was taped a few years after theatrical performances of La clemenza di Tito at Covent Garden in which Baker, Burrows, Lloyd and Minton sang the same roles as they do on the recording, and in which Davis was also the conductor. The staging, first seen in 1973, was produced by Antony Besch and designed by John Stoddart.
The album does not present an entirely complete version of the opera, several passages of recitativo secco being omitted. The Covent Garden orchestra plays with modern instruments rather than the kind that were used in Mozart's own era.
Recording
The album was recorded using analogue technology in July 1976 at an unspecified location in London.
Packaging
The cover of the first CD issue of the album is the work of Akamori Ralf Krieger.
Critical reception
Reviews
The musicologist Stanley Sadie reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in November 1977. Philips's casting of Dame Janet Baker and Yvonne Minton had given the recording "immense strength and dramatic vitality at its centre", he wrote. As Vitellia, the bitter daughter of a deposed emperor trying to manipulate her lover into murdering her father's successor, Baker was by turns subtle or domineering as the moment required. She sang with a "marvellous firmness and evenness of tone and steadiness of line", falling into imperfection only when Mozart took her higher up the stave than she was comfortable with. In the castrato role of Sesto, the infatuated instrument of Vitellia's scheming, Yvonne Minton delivered a performance that was arguably more impressive still. She was equally successful at portraying both sides of Sesto's character: the youth besotted with his vengeful mistress, and the "Roman of the highest standards of honour, courage and resolve" torn by the competing claims of duty and desire. And as well as singing with "real dramatic power", Minton displayed "virtuosity of a high order". Pure, superb and magnificent were just some of the accolades that Sadie bestowed on her vocalism, although he acknowledged that sometimes. like Baker, she perpetrated an imperfect note which should have been mended by a retake. Stuart Burrows was scarcely less good as the third of the opera's principals, "a strong Tito, lyrical when he [was] being gentle and merciful, yet with a force ... in the more imperial music that [made] him a plausible figure as a Roman emperor." Frederica von Stade did splendidly in another Mozart en travesti role to set beside her Cherubino, singing Annio with force and true rhetorical power in the scene where the young man advised Sesto to throw himself on Tito's mercy. In the other secondary roles, Lucia Popp was affecting as an argent-bright Servilia and Robert Lloyd was "properly sturdy" as the Praetorian soldier, Publio. Covent Garden's orchestra played splendidly, with the opera's famous clarinet and basset-horn obbligatos both dispatched with distinction. Conducting, Davis infused the album with all the energy of a live performance, eliciting "taut rhythms, firm accents [and] a general urgency". It was obvious that Davis, his orchestra and several of his soloists had profited greatly having presented Tito at Covent Garden. Well recorded and well balanced, the album was certainly the best version of the opera yet committed to disc.