★★★★★
Verdi's Otello as conducted by Riccardo Muti benefits from tip-top precision from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra players. They reach a level of pristine excellence that any opera house orchestra - no matter how eminent - would struggle to equal. Recorded in Orchestra Hall, Chicago, in April 2011, the wide range and high-definition focus of the sound give highlights such as the opening storm a thrilling sharpness of detail...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-03-04
★★★★★
It has its imperfections. Conductor Massimo Zanetti opts for slow speeds, which nicely emphasise the score's elegiac mood and gathering tensions, but also lead to a sense of protractedness in places. The chorus, the Wiener Singakademie, sound too few in number and are placed so far back as to be virtually inaudible when singing softly. And Kristine Opolais's Amelia takes a while to settle, though there's no mistaking the intensity she brings to the closing scenes...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-11
★★★★★
Daniel Barenboim's new recording of the Requiem, his second, was taped live at La Scala Milan last year. Not everyone, I suspect, will like it. It's a thoughtful, considered interpretation that places the emphasis not so much on the terrors of divine judgment as on mankind's suffering in the face of the unknown...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-11
★★★★★
This beautiful disc from Antonio Pappano and the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia covers roughly the same territory as their Prom this summer. The main work is the Four Sacred Pieces, the final expression of Verdi's ambiguous feelings towards religion, completed in 1896. The closing Te Deum invokes the implacable, remote deity of the Requiem for one last time, while the Virgin Mary's contemplation of the crucified Christ in the Stabat Mater is primarily seen in human rather than devotional...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-11
★★★★★
"The greatest living interpreter of Verdi" is how Riccardo Muti is described in the sleeve notes for his new Otello, taped live in Chicago in 2011 and released on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's own label. Muti's Verdi hasn't, in fact, been universally persuasive by any means, though his pressured, detailed style suits Otello rather well. He emphasises the measured, inexorable way in which the tragedy unfolds, and it's only in the Act I love duet that you wish he'd relax a bit...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-11
★★★★★
One of the most influential singers of the 20th century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died last May, aged 86. Primarily associated with the German repertoire, he was also a fine Verdian, particularly noted for his performances as Posa in Don Carlos, which he sings in this 1965 telecast from the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He's in marginally better voice than on his famous studio recording of the work for Decca, though it's the subtle physicality of his acting that is the real revelation here...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Given the Brodsky Quartet's dedication to string quartet repertoire since they formed, very young, in 1972 - some 3,000 concerts and more than 60 recordings - they can allow themselves a sunny diversion. These six works are by composers not associated with string quartets. The mood is Italianate, but not exclusively so, as in Piazzolla's febrile Four, for Tango or Turina's smoochy The Toreador's Prayer...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-03-23
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDVerdi, RossiniVerdi/ Rossini: Markevitch (Requiem/ Overtures) (ICA Classics: ICAC 5068)Igor MarkevitchICA Classics2012 Born in Kiev, but brought up in western Europe, the composer and conductor Igor Markevitch visited Moscow in 1960 for a series of concerts with the Philharmonic, among which was this performance of Verdi's Requiem, which was an unknown quantity in the Soviet Union at the time...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-07-16
★★★★★
Too little of radical, German director Peter Konwitschny's work has been seen in the UK. From his Traviata, however, you get a strong sense of the impact he is able to generate. It was filmed in Graz earlier this year, and reportedly co-produced with ENO. The production is stark and uncompromising, played out in modern dress against a bare set of red drapes. Konwitschny imagines Violetta (Marlis Petersen) trapped between demimonde cults of celebrity and bourgeois codes of moral respectability...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2011-12-12