Giuseppe Sinopoli

Dvorák’s Stabat Mater op. 58, Staatskapelle Dresden

(Deutsche Grammophon)

Antonín Dvorák was working on his setting of the Stabat Mater at a time of professional triumph and personal tragedy. By the time he completed the massive work for chorus, vocal soloists and orchestra, in 1877, the young man had firmly secured a reputation as one of the most important composers of his time, and had also endured the deaths of all three of his children. The Stabat Mater is, like Verdi’s Requiem, a religious opus that employs raw emotion and secular theatricality to express deeply personal situations in the context of a formal Latin mass. Like Verdi, Dvorák does no disrespect to the religious meaning of the mass; indeed, he honors the dignity and love of the story of Mary with deep poignancy and facile technique. The dynamic profile of the work is somewhat narrow, and the pacing is deliberate, but Dvorák is hardly stodgy, and revels in harmonic twists and turns of great, strange beauty. Dvorák does not achieve the astounding emotional range of the Verdi Requiem, and yet this is a work of profound allure. This is the last recording of the late Giuseppe Sinopoli, the Italian physician-turned-conductor, who died suddenly in performance. It serves as a moving memorial to his prodigious skills.

—Peter Burwasser