Belfry Messa

The last recording of conductor Lorin Maazel. World-famous conductor Lorin Maazel was chief conductor of the Münchner Philharmoniker until shortly before his death in July 2014 at the age of 84. This live recording, which happened in February 2014, is probably the last recording of Maazel. It documents an acclaimed and moving concert in the Munich Philharmonie with Lorin Maazel and the Münchner Philharmoniker and their choir per-forming Verdi’s famous requiem. The excellent soloists were Anja Harteros (soprano), Daniela Barcellona (mezzo-soprano), Wookyung Kim (tenor) and Georg Zeppenfeld (bass).

I Musici di Santa Pelagia hanno partecipato a numerose rassegne musicali e a manifestazioni di risonanza internazionale sia in Italia sia all’estero. Roma Festival Barocco, MiTo, Les concerts à Saint-Germain (Ginevra) e Mille anni di Musica Italiana (Madrid), ottenendo ampi consensi di pubblico e critica.

This set, issued to mark the 75th anniversary of Fricsay's birth, dates from late 1960 when the conductor was already suffering from the disease that killed him. It was to prove to be his final performance of the piece. I don't think it's fanciful to feel in this intensely dramatic and immediate reading that the conductor fully realized his own mortality. At any rate it's an interpretation of tragic force and lyrical beauty that eclipses most of its rivals. Fricsay was here working with a choir and orchestra entirely devoted to him and, as in the Shaw performance on Telarc/Conifer such familiarity pays huge dividends in terms of unified thought. Then, the circumstances of a live occasion seem to infect everyone concerned with a feeling of urgency.

Gioachino Rossini's Messa di Gloria of 1821, right in the middle of the years when he ruled the operatic scene, has been less often recorded than the free-spirited and personal Stabat Mater of his old age. Various reasons could be advanced for this comparative neglect. Stacked up against Rossini's operas of the period it's something of a mixed bag. Some of it is intensely operatic, but it also looks back to the past with its giant contrapuntal "Cum sancto spiritu" (the mass consists of a Kyrie and Gloria). From the point of view of the cult of individual Romantic genius, a major problem is that Rossini may have had a collaborator on the work, one Pietro Raimondi, who honed some of the more polyphonic passages.

While the German tradition observes a strict distinction between sacred and secular styles, the 19th-century Italian Mass can feel more akin to attending an operatic performance. Donizetti’s church music, consisting of at least a hundred items, has hardly been explored. Individual movements were often later recycled by the composer, in cantata-like fashion, to form a complete Mass, and it is this ad hoc technique that Franz Hauk has used to create a new work, the Messa di Gloria and Credo in D. This includes an expansive Qui sedes with its violin solo written for the famous violinist-composer Pietro Rovelli, and is completed with movements by Johann Simon Mayr from whom Donizetti learned his compositional craft in settings of sacred texts.

This religious masterpiece, composed in memory of the great Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), has themes even more cosmic than any in Verdi's other operas: life and death, heaven and hell, the Christian vision of humanity's redemption, the end of the world, and the last judgment. Verdi's music rises to the tremendous demands of this subject matter; it is music of grandeur, guilt, terror, and consolation, with a breadth of vision and an intensity of feeling unique in the composer's work and in religious music. John Eliot Gardiner's is the first recording made with period instruments, a kind of performance that some musiclovers still dismiss as dilettantism, more concerned with musicological correctness than feeling and communication.

The most comprehensive edition devoted to Gioacchino Rossini marking his 150th anniversary. Born in 1792, Rossini was the most popular opera composer of his time. Although he retired from the Opera scene in 1829, he continued to compose in other genres, including sacred music, piano and chamber works. He did gather his late works under the ironic title Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), which veils a true collection of masterworks.

Nato a Bologna nel 1661 e ivi morto nel Bologna 1756, Giacomo Antonio Perti si formò all’eccellente scuola cittadina e si perfezionò a Parma con Giuseppe Corso detto il Celano che era invece di scuola romana. Così ferrato di studi, presto cominciò a comporre per il teatro, divenne principe dell’Accademia Filarmonica, partecipò alla polemica fra Corelli e Colonna (prendendo le parti del primo, il più giovane), divenne maestro della cappella della metropolitana di S. Pietro e nel 1696, finalmente, acquisì la maggiore cappella di S. Petronio che tenne per 60 anni