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Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder

Richard Strauss (Composers)

George Szell (Conductor)

  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Soprano)
London Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra)

Audio CD (1991)

Number of Discs: 1

Label: EMI 7 47276 2

SPARS Code: ADD

Strauss completed his late, lovely masterpiece, the Four Last Songs between May and September 1948. A fifth song was started but not finished. Sadly, barely a year later, the composer died without ever hearing them in performance. Throughout his life Strauss had shown a distinct penchant for the soprano voice - one only has to recollect the three magnificent but demanding soprano roles in Der Rosenkavalier for instance. It is therefore fitting that this sublime last work with its fine vocal writing and opulent orchestrations (with glorious string parts), should be given to the soprano.

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Rossini: Stabat Mater

Giachino Rossini (Composer)
Antonio Pappano (Conductor)

 Lawrence Brownlee, Joyce DiDonato, Anna Netrebko, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo 

 (Performers)

Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Orchestra)

Audio CD (2010)
Number of Discs: 1

Label: Emi Classics
SPARS Code: DDD

The Stabat mater is a work with a complex provenance and an unusual aesthetic. Distinguished conductors and even on occasion distinguished (if rarely well-matched) quartets of soloists have been lined up to deliver bold and serious-sounding renderings which have often stopped the piece dead in its tracks. Giulini’s live 1978, now on Testament and identical in most essentials to his 1981 London studio recording, is a representative example of this. Richard Hickox and Marcus Creed resisted the temptation to fit the work into a mid-19th-century operatic straitjacket. But if an antediluvian choral manner can productively be dispensed with, the quintessentially Rossinian vocal style cannot.

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