Listening to Threepenny Opera, Decca with Mauceri conducting. I must say, Mauceri has wonderful taste in music - can't be faulted - and occasionally he's made a decent album. But he clearly knows nothing about sound and every album I've heard from him is recorded distantly and mastered too low. I have never heard so lifeless a version of Threepenny in my life and you hear it from note one of the overture, which is funereal in pace. Ute Hagen is fine and so are the most of the other singers. But this requires energy and it also requires that the band be, I don't know, present?
