It looks as though the bad times are over for Rossini's Stabat mater. During the 1970s and 1980s an influential corps of young singers, and even the occasional conductor, came to know at first hand a good deal more about Rossini and the Rossini style than had been the case for several generations. As a result, this ''spavined cheval de bataille'' (G. B. Shaw's phrase about the ''Inflammatus'', but it could equally well apply to the work itself c. 1890) has been re-born as a stylish young colt with a good pedigree and plenty of form.
Certainly, Bychkov's new recording is light-years away from the kind of musical monstrosities that were being foisted on us in the 1960s by conductors like Kertesz, who was clearly bored by the work, or Schippers, who treated it as an essay in sub-operatic rodomontade. Not that Bychkov isn't without his foibles. At first, I thought we had a real winner here: the perfect complement to Hickox's splendidly direct, almost classical reading on Chandos. In the opening movement, Bychkov establishes a real sense of grieving. Both the playing and the recording (of which more later) suggest some brooding Orthodox rite, in marked contrast to Hickox's more cheerful Church of England view of the proceedings. Later on, though, Bychkov is rather too prone to melancholy broodings, often at strange junctures. As the bass prepares to launch into his generous A major tune in the ''Pro peccatis'', Bychkov drops the tempo back from a plausible crotchet=90 (Hickox's tempo, more or less) to a self-indulgent crotchet=72. Della Jones (Hickox) and Cecilia Bartoli are amongst the very finest mezzo-sopranos to have recorded this work, but in the ''Fac ut portem'' Bartoli is often stranded by Bychkov's lethargic pulse. And there are similar problems in the ''Quis est homo'' with Vaness and Bartoli.
If Hickox's Helen Field outshines Vaness here, and in the ''Inflammatus'', it is partly a result of an added warmth and inwardness in Field's singing, partly a tribute to the gleaming acoustic of St Jude's Church, that handsome brooding pile high in windy Hampstead. The Philips recording, made in an unspecified location in Munich, makes a good initial impression—the opening, as I say, is intensely atmospheric—but as the performance unfolds so the recording comes to seem duller, more muted, more circumspect than the Chandos. With the latter the church acoustic seems to be a player in the drama. Perhaps at times the Chandos sound is a bit too lively, but the compensations—added radiance on soprano tone, extra sonority for the basses, and a general sense of an all-encompassing ecclesiastical atmosphere—are powerful added attractions.
The Chandos recording also gives the LSO Chorus more presence than its Bavarian rivals. In the unaccompanied ''Quando corpus morietur'', the Bavarian basses sound strangely distant, and though the Bavarian chorus is a good one, well trained in the two unaccompanied movements, there is not that absolute beauty and fulness of tone, allied to a real sense of drama, that we have from Hickox's singers. Chandos's Roderick Earle produces a fuller, richer sound than Philips's Ferruccio Furlanetto and there is a genuine sense of ensemble, of Earle as primus inter pares, in the ''Eja, mater''.
Oddly enough, I would have expected Bychkov to provide the more dramatic reading: the incipient romanticism of his conducting leading to fine climaxes later on. But it is the more classically inclined Hickox who conjures really thrilling cries of ''Paradisi'' near the end of ''Quando corpus morietur''; and it is Hickox who throws caution (almost) to the wind in the final movement, driving Rossini's sham fugal writing brilliantly on. Alongside this, Bychkov sounds oddly circumspect.
There are those, perhaps, who will find Hickox's performances a shade too extrovert in places. His tenor, Arthur Davies, though sensitive in ensembles, can be fairly uninhibited in some of his solos. He doesn't aspirate runs as Bychkov's Francisco Araiza does, but some will prefer Araiza's calmer manner, his greater sense of inwardness. In the end, though, the balance of points remains very firmly with Hickox, his choir and his soloists. And with that wonderful acoustic that has been so skilfully accommodated by the Chandos engineers.'