By some curious chance, Rossini's Stabat mater is something of a rarity on the gramophone. Extant recordings have yet to reach double figures and of those only three the Giulini/DG, the Muti/EMI, and the deleted 1955 DG recording conducted by Ferenc Fricsay—have any real merit. The 1971 Decca recording under Kertesz, which now returns as a mid-price CD, is strongly cast and has the advantage of some dedicated choral contributions from Arthur Oldham's LSO Chorus. But none of this is to much avail when the conducting itself is so perfunctory. I can find little evidence anywhere in this performance that Kertesz had read, let alone pondered, the words of the text Rossini is setting or the atmosphere he is clearly attempting to establish. This is in stark contrast to the conducting of Giulini or of Kertesz's compatriot, Fricsay, whose reading was a model of dedication and sensitivity to the mood of the famous thirteenth-century Latin poem.
Scimone's conducting on the new Erato recording isn't perfunctory but it is uneven, often distractingly quick, and frequently guilty of a degree of rhythmic regimentation that leaves the soloists unable to breathe or phrase at all adequately. Some of the choral work is good, with the Ambrosian Singers given space in the ''Quando corpus morietur'' both by Scimone and by the full and open acoustic of the church at Monselice, south of Padua, where the recording was made. Gasdia is less fortunate. Scimone is at his most regimental in the ''Inflammatus'' and Gasdia's voice is not especially well matched with Zimmermann's in the ''Quis est homo''. The bass is no more than tolerable, and like most basses, he lacks the required trill. (Pol Plancon has it on his 1904 recording of the ''Pro peccatis'', shaming most of his successors.) Merritt's voice, by contrast, grows yearly in range and refinement. He understands Rossini's neo-classical heroic style and thus out-manoeuvres Pavarotti (Decca) in the ''Cuius animam''.
Both these performances are an advance on some of the more calamitous accounts of the work but neither can compete with the Giulini on DG. Meanwhile, let us hope that the thought of the Rossini bicentenary in 1992 might tempt one of the companies into trying to assemble a team with the necessary skill and insight to do this difficult work real justice.'