Le nozze di Figaro is a 169-minute studio album of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera, performed by Christiane Barbaux, Jules Bastin, Jane Berbié, Ileana Cotrubas, José van Dam, Zoltan Kélémén, Tom Krause, Marjon Lambriks, Frederica von Stade, Anna Tomowa-Sintow and Heinz Zednik with the Chorus of the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

In act 3 of the opera, the sextet has traditionally been performed after the Count's recitative and aria "Hai già vinta la causa!...

In 1963, Robert Moberly and Christopher Raeburn suggested that this sequence entailed defects in the opera's storyline, and conjectured that originally Mozart and da Ponte had placed the sextet after the Countess's number, not before it.

They pointed out that at the première of the opera, Antonio and Bartolo had been performed by the same singer, and argued that the score might have been rearranged to give him the opportunity to change his costume.

Herbert von Karajan adopted the Moberly-Raeburn sequence when conducting Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's new staging of the opera at the Salzburg Festival in 1973, and adhered to it when he made the present album (of which Raeburn was the producer).

Tom Krause was the more successful of the Almavivas, singing with "plenty of weight and virility", powerfully conveying the "rage, frustration and wounded social pride" that consumed the priapic Count after his failure to seduce his servant's fiancée.

As his dignified wife, Anna Tomowa-Sintow sang with a voice that was "rich, glowing [and] spacious", but perhaps not as lissom or accurate as the bel canto ideal.

Van Dam was meticulous in his attention to every nuance both of Figaro's music and of its dramatic context, attending to even the smallest minutiae with the utmost conscientiousness.

The Vienna Philharmonic's strings were "very rich, smooth and beautiful", but its woodwinds were too anodyne to satisfactorily express the commentary on the drama that Mozart had written for them.

The album's engineering too was less than ideal, providing a convincingly theatrical stereo soundstage but offering an anachronistic "sleek and rounded" audio with a reverberant acoustic and a balance that favoured strings over woodwinds and instruments over singers.

Frederica von Stade was "excellent throughout", and notably sang a "Non so più" very different from the exuberant performance on her bel canto recital disc,[5] with "the voice caressing and yearning to an accompaniment of gentle murmurs and subdued ardours and excitements".

He was impressed by Karajan's "special touch", and in particular by the considered way in which the conductor had distinguished between unguarded conversation and conspiratorial asides in Mozart's recitativo secco.

The Vienna Philharmonic played from the heart in the kind of performance that had led some critics to hail them as the finest orchestra in the world.

[10] Richard Lawrence noted the album briefly in a survey of the Le nozze di Figaro discography in Gramophone's 2011 Awards issue.

[2] The booklet provided libretti, synopses, an essay by Stanley Sadie and a note by Christopher Raeburn on the Moberly-Raeburn proposal, all in English, French, German and Italian.