There is no shortage of good couplings of Respighi’s three sets of Roman pictures, but this is among the very best of them. The orchestral playing is superfine, but Jansons sensibly allows a degree of personal expressiveness from his solo players, several of whom are very properly named: the beautifully hushed clarinet in “Pines of the Janiculum” is especially good (all the better for not being upstaged by an inappropriately close nightingale; this one is poetically distant). But then to be fair all the brass players in Festivals and “Pines of the Appian Way” deserve star billing. Jansons is as good at rhythmic vigour as at brilliant colour: the children playing soldiers under the Villa Borghese’s pines are tough kids, not little angels in smocks, and for fear of being trampled underfoot by the carnival crowds in “La Befana” (No. 4 of Festivals) you’d better get out of the way sharpish. In this latter movement, by the way, Respighi’s impersonation of a barrel-organ is very funny as well as vividly realistic.
Reservations? Oh, I suppose there could have been a touch more tenderness to the evocation of shepherds watering their flocks at the Valle Giulia fountain. I was surprised by the length of the pause between the first two movements of Pines (I prefer to be abruptly whisked from the bright sun of the Villa Borghese to the tangible gloom of the catacombs). But Respighi’s quieter colours are as carefully rendered as his more scorching ones, and the recording ensures that precision is as noticeable as sonorous magnificence. My personal favourite among recent couplings of all three suites is Riccardo Muti’s with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra rivalling it in sound quality and cost (mid price). Jansons doesn’t quite dislodge either, but comes very close. But Enrique Batiz and the RPO are not far behind, and that coupling is at super-bargain price.'