This morning I listened to CD Review, as is my custom of a Saturday morning, and their record of the week was a performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro which sounded way above average. Mid price, they said. I might just be buying it right off the shelf at HMV.

The thing is, I've never really taken to opera, and if you do take to Mozart (as I do, big time, the symphonies and piano concertos, the wind serenades, the string quintets, ) then you are missing the thing that is, so everyone says, at the very core of Mozart's output. The piano concertos, for example, especially the last movements, abound with operatic references, and I heard someone say the other day (in what context I have totally forgotten) that for Beethoven music was blah, and for Brahms (or someone) it was blah blah, and for Mozart it was … singing. So to get Mozart, the more you know about his operas the better.

I love the Magic Flute, but that is because (at any rate in large chunks – although excluding the Birdcatcher bits) it is Mozart's least "operatic" opera, nearer to an oratorio, or even one of those symphonies where there just happen to be singers at the front. The Mozart operas where people do things like hide in cupboards and sing lots of recitative have never appealed to me - i.e. The Marriage of Figaro. So this just might be my foot in the door.

What I liked about it was that the women singers sounded like sexy young women, rather than singing battleships. There was a touch of the Broadway Musical about it all, not least in the fact that, if you knew Italian, you would actually have been able to make out the words that they were singing, and how they felt about it all. The Joan Sutherland/Cecilia Bartoli style, where the sound disappears into the back of the throat into a homogonised sound whose purpose is to get itself to the back of a too-big opera house rather than the meaning to an audience in a smaller and nicer opera house, has never appealed to me. The microphone was invented to do away with this nonsense, is my opinion. And in a recording studio, they have microphones, don't they? So, let's for god's sake hear the words properly, and let them for god's sake sound like the young humans they are supposed to be, and not just middle aged opera singers. (I went to an English National Opera performance of Madame Butterfly a few years ago, and although it was sung "in English", I could not make out one damn work that MB sang. Everything was just woor woor woor, with only the consonants changing. Ridiculous.)

So, like I say, what I'm saying is, I might just buy this.

And it's not even a DVD.