NEW RELEASES

Award-winning conductor Antonio Pappano and his acclaimed Roman Orchestra e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia continue their successful collaboration with EMI Classics with a new recording of Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The recording features a unique cast of star soloists – Anna Netrebko, Joyce DiDonato, Lawrence Brownlee and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo in the first major studio recording of the Stabat Mater in ten years.

Although Rossini focused heavily on opera, he was still able to find some time to undertake commissions of a non-operatic nature. Supreme among these was to be the Stabat Mater. “We know Rossini mainly as an operatic composer” says Maestro Pappano, “and his fame is due mainly to his comic operas, but he wrote several opera seria – serious dramatic works. I would say that the Stabat Mater, the picture of the Virgin Mary standing below the crucifix watching her son die and this beautiful set of prayers or scene setting is sublimely put to music by Rossini.”“It’s a piece I have performed often with my group here, the chorus and the orchestra, but I have a set of soloists who are just magnificent – Anna Netrebko, Joyce DiDonato, Lawrence Brownlee and Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, a dream team. Every time you do this piece with different soloists it brings something new. I’m very excited to have singers who can be very dramatic on the one side and extremely lyrical on the other side and that’s key to this work.”