Search - Leopold Stokowski, BBC Philharmonic :: Stokowski's Symphonic Baroque

Finding an old friend and new wonders

A. G. Plumb | Melbourne, Australia | 04/25/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Many years ago I owned a prerecorded tape of Stokowski transcriptions which included 'Tu mancavi a tormentarmi, crudelissima speranza' by Antonio Cesti. This is a wonderfully evocative piece that raised impossible imagery of fleets of spaceships passing in the stillness of deep space, seen but not acknowledged to each other. Neither Cesti nor Stokoswki could have seen the music this way, but for me .... Anyway I stopped listening to tapes and lost contact with the piece. As twenty years or so passed I became more and more haunted by my memory of Stokowski's transcription - just how similar to Barber's celebrated Adagio is the Cesti, I couldn't help but ask myself?Of course, I kept looking for the piece but until now no collections of Stokowski included it. But here it is again. And doesn't it still invoke the same response (and it is only superficially like the Barber). I love this CD for this piece if for nothing else - but there is so much enjoyable music here, I recommend it to all music lovers.Incidentally, searching for this CD under its title 'Stokowski's Orchestral Baroque' fails because of a text error in the title at Amazon.com"