I just love James Levine’s conducting and those marvelous Met musicians for a “big band” version of this overture!

“It was his bequest to mankind, his appeal to the ideals of humanity. His last work is not Tito or the Requiem; it is Die Zauberflöte. Into the Overture, which is anything but a Singspiel overture, he compressed the struggle and victory of mankind, using the symbolic means of polyphony; working out, laborious working out in the development section; struggle and triumph”

—Alfred Einstein. “Mozart His Character, His Work”. 1961