Naxos Rosenkavalier

Michael Oliver, International Opera Collector, Spring 1999

“Two recent releases in Naxos’s ‘Immortal Performances’ series will have many collectors agog with expectation. A performance of Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, recorded at the New York Met in January 1939, is of capital interest as the only ‘complete’ record of Lotte Lehmann’s portrayal of the Marschallin, ‘complete’ in quotation marks because the opera is so savagely cut (roughly 20 minutes from each act) that there is room for a brief, very late but touching song recital by Lehmann on the third CD. In the opera a few signs of vocal unease betray the fact that this is a lady in her fifties, but no less unmistakably that she is a very great lady indeed: she silences the audience with her noble launching of the Act 3 Trio and her aristocratic grace is everywhere apparent.... The recorded sound is screamingly harsh at times, Artur Bodanzky’s orchestra often hideously distorted. (8.110034/6)”