Verdi

More than 25 years after his first EMI album, Antonio Pappano has established himself as a leading figure of conducting, particularly in music from his native Italy. This collection includes excerpts from all his EMI and Warner Italian recordings, from the famous Verdi and Puccini cycles with Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu to the recent praised versions of Turandot and Rossini’s sacred works.

The Verdi Messa da Requiem is probably the best known Requiem in the repertoire. Many great conductors have recorded it. I’m thinking of Toscanini at New York/1951, Victor De Sabata at Milan/1954 and probably the best known of all Carlo-Maria Giulini at London/1964-65. Some more recent versions have proved popular notably John Eliot Gardiner using period instruments in London/1992, Claudio Abbado at Berlin/2001 and also Nikolaus Harnoncourt at Vienna/2004.

Of the 10 selections on this disc of Verdi “discoveries”, four are bona fide world premieres, though in one of those, the Variations for Oboe and Orchestra, only the orchestral part is by Verdi. In the late 1830s clarinetist Giacomo Mori hired the young Verdi to provide an orchestra accompaniment to his variations on the theme “Canto di Virginia”. Here, Verdi displays his early skill at handling large orchestral forces, and the same can be said of his Variations for Piano and Orchestra. However, there are few musical hints in these works–or in the Capriccio for Oboe and Orchestra, the Sinfonia in C, or the Adagio for Trumpet and Orchestra–that suggest the great master Verdi was to become.

Antonio Pappano and his Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi with this programme of sacred choral music. The repertoire consists of the Four Sacred Pieces and, with soprano Maria Agresta as the soloist, the 1880 Ave Maria and the original version of Libera me from the Messa da Requiem. Pappano and his forces will perform this programme on 20 July at the Royal Albert Hall for the 2013 BBC Proms.

Verdi's Requiem–certainly one of his most moving, eloquent masterpieces–was written in honor of the great Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni, whom he admired enormously both for his writings and his political outlook. Though its text is the Latin liturgy, it has been called Verdi's greatest opera because of its basically dramatic character, as well as his own ambivalent attitude toward organized religion. Thus, interpretations tend to emphasize its secular or its sacred aspect, though, naturally, the soloists are trained in the Verdi opera tradition.

Ever since his brilliant first appearance in Munich with the Requiem, he is still a regular guest at the BR. Riccardo Muti is currently regarded as a mature representative of the great Italian tradition. This CD release therefore has to be seen as a “classically polished gem” – a gem that shines and flashes as beautifully and as brilliantly as ever!