Antonio Pappano's new Tchaikovsky disc is a disappointment. The various items were recorded live in Rome during a retrospective of the composer's work at the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and though you get a strong sense of the combination of precision and viscerality that Pappano can generate on the podium, his overall approach to Tchaikovsky, on this showing, is altogether too rigid and unyielding. Romeo and Juliet, taped later than the rest of the disc, fares best, with the Wagnerian overtones of Friar Laurence's music well to the fore and the famous love scenes presented as a study of mature passion rather than teenage impulsiveness.
Elsewhere, however, things are too hard-driven. The outer sections of Francesca da Rimini are suitably hellish, though the central sequence drags. The 1812 Overture comes in its comparatively unfamiliar choral version, and aspires to a mood of vacuous triumph, more suited to Shostakovich than Tchaikovsky. The playing throughout is fine, if occasionally marred by some thinness of tone in the upper strings.
