Dazzling recordings of favourite and less well-known overtures. Classic FM Drive Featured Album, 20 January 2014. The Prague Sinfonia Orchestra are on a mission to record all of Rossini’s overtures ...

Antonio Pappano’s Rome-based forces have had huge deserved success in the choral repertoire; here he ventures into Rossini’s dazzling opera overtures and the results are predictably fizzy and pungent: ...

If there is a familiar template to the structure of most of Rossini’s opera overtures, Antonio Pappano and his Rome orchestra reveal that there is much more than rum-ti-tum routine in their musical ...

(La) Scala di seta, '(The) Silken Ladder', Movements: Overture Santa Cecilia Academy Orchestra, Rome Antonio Pappano, Conductor Gioachino Rossini, Composer (Il) Signor Bruschino (or Il figlio per ...

LATE last November I raved about Volume One of a new Naxos project to record all of Rossini's overtures in a four-volume set. The standard of Prague playing with conductor Christian Benda was ...

I've always had a soft spot for Gioacchino Rossini's overtures. Their slow introductions and sprightly melodies invariably lead to a big crescendo passage, in which Rossini repeats a motif several ...

Any self-respecting music-lover will have at least two or three of Rossini's Overtures in their collections. The best-known of them, including The Barber Of Seville and The Thieving Magpie, are so ...

Although it boasts one of the most famous sequences of music in existence, Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell is hardly a staple of the operatic repertoire. At five hours long in its original ...

What would Rossini have made of this disc? It features the Croatian counter-tenor Max Emanuel Cencic singing a clutch of his operatic arias, mostly written for contraltos or mezzos in drag, though one ...

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 ...