Royal Swedish Opera Archives Vol. 6 – Mozart

The Mozart tradition of the 1950s at the Stockholm Opera is an interesting transition period, as this album demonstrates. All the way from the oldest conductor on this double CD box, Herbert Sandberg, who had worked with singers born in the nineteenth century, and artists such as Hjördis Schymberg and Sigurd Björling, over the middle generation including Birgit Nilsson and Eva Prytz, to the new generation of Mozart singers who made their debut in the 1950s – Ingvar Wixell, Erik Saedén, Busk-Margit Jonsson and Birgit Nordin. Together with Lars af Malmborg – coach, conductor and later on opera director – they developed a new stylistic interpretation with a great deal of the historical awareness that only today is considered a matter of course.

In this documentation of the Mozart culture at the Stockholm Opera over close to two decades we can listen to more than thirty artists of the Royal Opera in minor as well as big roles, under the direction of Herbert Sandberg, Michael Gielen and Lars af Malmborg, and audibly directed down to the most insignificant dialogue or recitative by Harald Andrée, Göran Gentele and Lars Runsten. A period of transition between traditions from the days of John Forsell, the fundamentalistic faith in the Urtext and a budding interest in authentic eighteenth-century music-making.