For month after month the giant music companies appear as cautious purveyors of predictably profitable pap. Then suddenly one of them -- EMI -- comes up with two of the most inspiring packages you're likely to encounter anywhere.
VERDI: Il Trovatore
Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu Antonio Pappano & London Symphony Orchestra
EMI 7243 5 57360 2 4
We're all going to die one day, so every moment has to be lived with the greatest possible intensity. That's what the music of Il Trovatore is really saying, and Antonio Pappano's incisive new version is probably the most dynamic, thrusting, thrilling and exciting ever put onto disc.
Last year the Italian-descended but London-born Pappano took over the directorship of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. He has conducted highly praised Puccini recordings (La Boheme, Tosca and Il Trittico), but now offers something totally different -- Verdi's most tigerishly ferocious score with an exceptionally high profile cast.
The result is absolutely magnificent. Words can hardly convey what excitement this music generates in Pappano's hands. If you buy only one opera recording this summer, make certain it's this one.
The killing combination with the public will be Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna as the two lovers, and both are indeed searingly dramatic. But the dark-voiced Larissa Diadkova as Azucena, and Thomas Hampson as a strong Conte di Luna, are also well up to the level this premium-ranking project inevitably demands. Even so, it's Pappano and his instrumentalists who in the last analysis make these CDs so extraordinary. The sound is eminently clear and brilliant, and this is likely to replace for many listeners the Leontyne Price/ Placido Domingo version as first choice for this opera.
Il Trovatore is not as popular with opera directors now as it was 50 years ago, but this sumptuous and intensely passionate version should put it back into the top rank, where of course its music has been all along. "This is the finest music in the universe" is a likely reaction on hearing these discs. It's not true, of course, but it would be totally understandable, especially if you've knocked back a couple of Absolut Vodkas before putting them into your stereo system.
BEETHOVEN: Symphonies 1-9
Sir Simon Rattle and Vienna Symphony Orchestra
EMI Classics, 7243 5 57445 2 4
In these days of religious madness on all sides, it's deeply reassuring to have these great classics of optimistic humanism ravishingly re-recorded by a modern master.
Simon Rattle's Beethoven cycle has innumerable virtues and not the least is its refusal to embrace eccentricity for its own sake. Rattle here has at his command one of the world's finest ensembles, packed as it is with virtuoso soloists in their own right, and in these live performances from last year he never puts a foot wrong. The sound is natural and pure, the readings confident and authoritative, yet also immensely inspiring.
The Fifth (where the last movement is astonishingly powerful and wonderful) has all the romping goblins imagined by E.M.Forster in Howard's End, the Seventh all the pagan grandeur Wagner heard in it. The surprise is in the normally diminutive Eighth, here almost as grand as its two neighbors.
For the Ninth Rattle brings to Vienna his old friends, the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, to fine effect. This is fantastically exciting music-making. With the recorded sound so clear and strong, and the performances so fresh and invigorating, this is over-familiar music once again made new. It's hard to believe there are better versions than these anywhere in the catalogue. Rattle may look like a gracefully graying cherub on the cover, but these are invariably powerful and arresting performances, and in many places absolutely stunning.
RSS