William Steinberg startles us right away by playing the Leonore Overture #3 instead of the normally heard Fidelio overture. His force of personality drives the entire performance. The singers are all excellent, especially Marjorie McChung and Frank Poretta as the secondary couple. She has a lovely lyric soprano, he a lovely lyric tenor (he sang Charlie Dalrymple on the record of Brigadoon highlights with Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones). Joshua Hecht sings Rocco with an attractive bass that contrasts well with Lee Cass' leaner timbre as Pizarro. Margaret Harshaw sings Leonore with strong, confident tones though she has to work for the high Bs (she gets them). Richard Cassilly is a marvelous Florestan, sung without the strained tone most of us are familiar with from twenty years later. The orchestra and chorus both do justice to Beethoven's score. Instead of the dialogue there was apparently a narrator between musical numbers. All of this is cut out until the section early in Act 2 that calls for the dialogue over the music (why Harshaw and Hecht didn't speak it is anyone's guess). The narrator isn't bad, but he's a little jarring. When Rocco and Jaquino interrupt the music later on in the dungeon scene one hears that the singers should've been allowed to do their own dialogue because Hecht and Poretta are so much more convincing. The sound is clear and very listenable throughout the performance.As a filler, Andy gives us Harshaw's stirring account of Beethoven's concert aria "Ah, perfido!"