La clemenza di Tito is a 127-minute studio album of the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by Dame Janet Baker, Stuart Burrows, Robert Lloyd.

Yvonne Minton, Lucia Popp and Frederica von Stade with the Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, under the direction of Sir Colin Davis.

The album was taped a few years after theatrical performances of La clemenza di Tito at Covent Garden in which Baker, Burrows, Lloyd and Minton sang the same roles as they do on the recording, and in which Davis was also the conductor.

As Vitellia, the bitter daughter of a deposed emperor trying to manipulate her lover into murdering her father's successor, Baker was by turns subtle or domineering as the moment required.

She was equally successful at portraying both sides of Sesto's character: the youth besotted with his vengeful mistress, and the "Roman of the highest standards of honour, courage and resolve" torn by the competing claims of duty and desire.

Stuart Burrows was scarcely less good as the third of the opera's principals, "a strong Tito, lyrical when he [was] being gentle and merciful, yet with a force ... in the more imperial music that [made] him a plausible figure as a Roman emperor."

Frederica von Stade did splendidly in another Mozart en travesti role to set beside her Cherubino, singing Annio with force and true rhetorical power in the scene where the young man advised Sesto to throw himself on Tito's mercy.

Stuart Burrows's Tito was "strong", Lucia Popp's Servilia "stunning", Yvonne Minton's Sesto "ably interpreted" and Frederica von Stade's Annio "quite adorable" despite "a tight little vibrato".

In a duet for Annio and Sesto, Frederica von Stade and Yvonne Minton sang with more "charm and lightness" than Böhm's Marga Schiml and Teresa Berganza.

On the other hand, Böhm himself sometimes conducted better than Davis, delivering a livelier Overture and a statelier March and allowing Tito more time to meditate in his dark night of the soul.

He thought that Yvonne Minton's Sesto had set the gold standard for the part - "a handsome, authoritative performance, creamy and firm in tone, secure in character".

She was "probably the most vicious, obsessively driven Vitellia on disc", until, after her epiphany of repentance, she sang her rondo of remorse "with an intense, traumatized inwardness and nobility of line".

In the secondary roles, Lucia Popp was "enchanting", Frederica von Stade "urgent and plangent" and the "oaken-voiced" Robert Lloyd the best Publio on disc.

[6] Discussing the album in his Gramophone survey in October 2010, Richard Wigmore concluded that it was the finest of all the recordings of the opera that had been performed with modern instruments.

"Baker's vicious Vitellia attains a tragic gravitas in her final scene," he wrote, "while Yvonne Minton's intensely 'lived' Sesto vindicates Davis's broad tempi, characteristic of the elegiac tinta he brings to Mozart's score.

"[10] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) La clemenza di Tito, opera seria in due atti (Prague, 1791), K. 621, with a libretto by Caterino Mazzolà (1745-1806) after Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) Act One Act Two In 1977, Philips released the album as a set of three LPs (catalogue number 6703 079) and on cassette (catalogue number 7699 038), both issues being accompanied by a booklet with notes, texts and translations.