I don’t quite get the “highlights” thing – why not buy the whole opera? It seems a bit strange to only get the singing bits (arias?) – I mean, I don’t decide to buy a Pink Floyd album and buy a version without the long intro to Wish You Were Here, do I? So why aren’t the musical bits a key part of an opera?
As for the album, it’s OK – we only listened to the first side. I’m a bit ambivalent about opera – I seem to like the idea of it more than actually listening to it, and anyway I randomly bought a 2LP set of Der Rosenkavalier in a charity shop last year. But digging a bit deeper, even that is still an abridged version. My dad’s version is conducted by Georg Solti and Ebay shows that there’s a 4LP version of it so this is very abridged.
Still, it might be slightly better than worthless according to Ebay and Discogs.