Roman Epics

I've been a little defensive about having so many recordings by Herbert von Karajan in my collection ( because of the critical hammering that Karajan habitually gets these days as both a musician and as a man) explained by the record club special offers in the early days of my classical collecting. I still find most of them to be acceptable recordings of core repertoire and a few to be outstanding because of the sound of the Berliner Philharmoniker. This is in fact the final such offering to come off the shelf, a disk mainly of music by Respighi featuring the Fountains of Rome, the Pines of Rome and Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute ( which are orchestrated lest there be any confusion ). Both the Fountains and the Pines are programmatic works with strong narratives behind each section and they are showpiece tone poems. Respighi doesn't have any overtly Italianate style, being in a more general European tradition, but he was a master orchestrator. Karajan was no early music authentic instrument practitioner, so the anachronistic orchestrations of the lute pieces are to his taste. The disk is filled out by Boccherini's Procession of the Military Night Watch in Madrid, a quintettino that follows logically from the Respighi lute arrangements, and by what to me is a largely redundant plod through of Giazotto's take on the "Albinoni Adagio" with an organ part taken by Wolfgang Meyer.