Pasta and Vino Rosso! The great Stefan Pop takes you on a delicious journey through the Italian opera world of Verdi. When Giuseppe Verdi (1813 - 1901) started working on the opera Nabucco in the early 1840s, it was hard to foresee a promising career that would make him the most successful opera composer of all time. On the contrary: Verdi was already around 30 years old when he celebrated his breakthrough at Milan's La Scala with Nabucco, his private life had been hit hard by misfortune and he was on the verge of letting his composing pen disappear into his desk drawer forever due to a lack of success. Fortunately, he did not do so and became Italy's best-known and most popular opera composer. The powerful Romanian tenor ?tefan Pop opens this recording with Questa o quella, and his subtle, penetrating and technically excellent voice is also evident in the other arias, which are imbued with passion. The carefully curated collection of arias on this CD provides a musical cross-section of Verdi's compositional sophistication. Together with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille under the baton of Lawrence Foster, ?tefan Pop succeeds in impressively depicting the artistic maturation process of Verdi's middle creative phase in particular.