When approach my shelf with opera records and look at the boxes I mostly see colors and I do not mean the color of the boxes… To me all operas have well-defined, very individual colors: form the purplo-neurotic colors of Mussorgsky, the magenta-shaky colors of Puccini, darkishly-cherry colors of Verdi to the brownly-imperative colors of Wagner, colorfully-grayish colors of R. Strauss and the pastelo-screaming color of Tchaikovsky.

With the Mozart’s colors... it is complicated…

However, there is one Mozart opera, that when I approach it, it is flashing on my shelf with all colors of the spectra and beg to me” “Kitty, pull me out!”  I so love this work that I can play it for a few days none-stopping! Ironically this is the only opera that I never cared even to read libretto or to make any attempts study it in-depth. It is beautiful as it, and the each single note in there is as perfect as it theoretically could be. It is light, it is not overwhelmed with self-impotence, it is almost superficial but it is so reach and so filled with the long-looking ingenious musical phrases that it is really overwhelming!

Sometime the flow of my life turns in one or another directions and suddenly I clearly feel that the events that I experience have some harmonic stricture and that could be perfectly portrayed by the specific musical moments form this opera. In those moments I play this opera and I am laughing and once aging am paying a metal tribute to the Mozart’s resourcefulness.

I am talking about the “Cosi Fan Tutte”… What a wonderful, wonderful work!  Again and again!

Somewhere at the very top of my list there is  a spectacular Stereo recording of Karl Böhm in 1962 in Kingswas Hall made by EMI. He did it with Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and with one of the most spectacular “crews” even was assembled for an opera: Schwarzkopf, Walter Berry, Ludwig, Krauss, Taddei, Berry…

If you can imagine anything most spending written for voices then the Final of the First Act then you have more vivid imagination then me… and I, if course, will argue that it is so…

Anyhow, the beauty of the after-midnight electricity forces to listen music deep in the night. It is great to live in Boston, Back Bay and in the same time have no neighbors! It is playing now; loud, loud, loud … third time… the only problem is that I have no automated record-flipping turntable… I probably should…

Meow…