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.