Today’s Chris’s Cache offers Auger’s astonishing musicality and virtuosity in excerpts from live broadcasts of five of the composer’s least performed pieces—Mitridate, Re di Ponto; Il Re Pastore, Lucio Silla, Ascanio in Alba, and Apollo et Hyacinthus plus Exsultate jubiltate.

From the mid-1970s into the early 1980s the Salzburg Mozart Week festival every January presented Leopold Hager and the Mozarteum Orchestra in some of the composer’s earliest vocal works. In conjunction with the Salzburg concerts, the performing forces then went into the recording studio, a project that was originally issued by Deutsche Gramophon.

When I first got interested in opera, I immediately gravitated to works by Mozart. Those deluxe DG sets were too expensive for me when they were released, so instead I bought reel-to-reel copies of broadcasts of the live concerts–I found these more exciting anyway. Most of the Hager recordings (except for Il Re Pastore which was issued on LP on the BASF label and as far as I know has never been released on CD) eventually found their way into the complete Mozart edition on Phillips transferred to CD to mark the bicentenary of the composer’s death.

Perhaps it’s not an accident that two Hager-Salzburg items that don’t include Auger — La Finta Semplice and La Finta Gardiniera—are the least successful of the series.

The first Mitridate, a staging at the summer festival, features Auger in the castrato role of Sifare and for some incomprehensible reason she was denied that character’s most beautiful aria “Lungi da te” which features a magnificent horn obbligato. However, we do get Auger’s exciting collaboration with Edda Moser in that opera’s great duet, a piece she’d later perform with Edita Gruberova when Auger took on Aspasia in a later Mitridate.

My favorite of this trove must be the Lucio Silla in which Auger is joined by the stellar trio of Julia Varady, Edith Mathis, and Helen Donath.

Mitridate, Re di Ponto

Sifare: Arleen Auger
Aspasia: Edda Moser

Felsenreitschule, Salzburg Festival Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Broadcast
25 August 1971

Exsultate, jubilate

Arleen Auger

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Broadcast
Salzburg Festival
12 August 1973

Il Re Pastore

Elisa: Arleen Auger
Aminta: Edith Mathis

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg Mozart Week
Broadcast
28 January 1974

Lucio Silla

Giunia: Arleen Auger
Cecilio: Julia Varady
Lucio Silla: Peter Schreier

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg Mozart Week

Broadcast
24 January 1975

Ascanio in Alba

Fauno: Arleen Auger

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg Mozart Week

Broadcast
23 January 1976

Mitridate, Re di Ponto

Aspasia: Arleen Auger
Sifare: Edita Gruberova

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg Mozart Week
Broadcast
21 January 1977

Apollo et Hyacinthus

Melia: Arleen Auger
Apollo: Cornelia Wulkopf

Mozarteum Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Hager
Salzburg Mozart Week
Broadcast
23 January 1981

More Mozart will follow this month on Chris’s Cache.

All of these Auger-Mozart bits can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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