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.

Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 3-4

Sergey Rachmaninov (Composer)

Antonio Pappano (Conductor)

Leif Ove Andsnes (Performer)

London Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra)

Audio CD

Release Date: (2010)

Number of Discs: 1

Label: EMI

SPARS Code: DDD

The passion burns from within in this incendiary account of Rachmaninov's third and fourth piano concertos. The amplitude of his melodies, the rich scoring and the insistent Russian melancholy are most potent when kept under control. The poetic, muscular Andsnes, sensitively and glitteringly accompanied by Pappano and the LSO, does just that.